The capricious forces of modernity and globalization have whirlwinded our lives into a state where memories last a mere ten seconds on SnapChat, love finds itself reduced to a quick swipe on Tinder, and existence can get on a redeye and be 3,000 miles away in hours. With all of this 21st century-induced extravagance, I can’t help but think that the time table of transience has been sped up beyond a rate that we humans are psychologically wired to handle. However, there is virtually nothing we can do to govern this speed or curb its rapidity, it has become an immutable component of modern life.

For much of my life, every event, party, conference, or other social gathering I have attended has been soured by my preoccupation with its expiration date; at any joyous occasion I can’t help but to keep a watchful eye fixated on the clock. As Christopher Nolan beautifully portrays in “Interstellar”, time dictates our reality and rules our universe. But how do we wrestle with the increasingly fleeting nature of everything? How do we conduct our lives in such a way that transcends these limitations?

Marx wrote that humans are creators, that our worlds become meaningful and connected to those around us via the tangible things we produce. In other words, a piece of our humanity is carried within what we yield. But if these creations are impermanent, inevitably bound for obsolescence or destruction and subject to the same rules of time that we are bound by, what does that mean for our capacity to last? Has our fast-paced digitized world made all of our individual creations more prone to being lost and subject to perpetual insignificance?

The creation of a sand Mandala is a tradition performed by Tibetan Buddhists that involves the drawing of intricate and ornate spiritual graphics. The construction takes up to 20 monks working non-stop who complete it in approximately two weeks. Upon completion, the entire, seven-square foot Mandala is ritually destroyed to demonstrate the ephemerality of the material world.

While this is obviously the practice of incredibly devout ascetics, I believe there is a lesson that all of us can incorporate into our daily lives. These monks make the decision to embrace ephemerality, making every short second the sand Mandala is fully finished inherently more valuable.

This is an important symbolic reminder that time passes and objects, people, and ideas fall by the wayside, becoming lost in a void of that which has been forgotten by the collective human memory or gone to the periphery of cyberspace after its short shelf life on a timeline has expired. However, it is important to realize and internalize one, simple fact: everything has its spawn. All emotions, thoughts, and actions all have their psychological root, whether liminal or subconscious, again, giving great weight to every, single moment.

Seemingly innocuous and arbitrary events can and do have profound impacts. This notion that the origins of some of our greatest feelings, ideologies, or deeds can be formulated without our conscious consent is both terrifying and intoxicating in the power it grants to pure happenstance. However, it is more irrational to fight against our fallible fears of expiration and the unknown and better to trust and lose ourselves to these currents that will land us, and by extension, our creations, in the place they need to be.

“Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice”

― Pico Iyer