The Tides Within: On Mortality, Meaning, and the Search for Stillness

A quiet meditation on mortality, impermanence, and the hope for clarity in a universe where even the prospect of legacy does not console the self

I do not yet have the actionable wisdom I seek. I am not yet a still pond; I am still stirred water.

Arun Kumar

Summary: A meditation on life’s impermanence and the tension between existence and mortality. Amid fleeting acts and uncertain legacy, the consciousness seeking a perspective that allows one to live with the reality of death — not with despair, cynicism, or nihilism, but with clarity, curiosity, and quiet acceptance.

I sit here, and it would be a blessing if I still be sitting here twenty years from now anchored in the same silence, perhaps by the same patch of morning light falling on the floor, the same hush of a house not yet stirring, and with the same cup of earl gray on the table next to me. To still be sitting here would be a blessing. To survive in this world of uncertainty, where everything is always changing, where even mountains crumble and stars burn out, is no small miracle.

While I sit here, my consciousness stirs, it rocks like a boat tethered but never still. It is rocked by the gravitational pull of two universal truths: that I exist, and that one day I will cease to. This duality creates continuous tides within me.

The pull of existence brings with it a need to act, to plan, to have a set of engagements. The pull of mortality makes all plans seem like footprints on a beach just before the tide rolls in. Sloshing with uncertainty between these two forces continuously rocks my consciousness. It does not know how to find an equilibrium, how to rest in the space pulled between being and not being.

While I sit here, some questions arise again and again. What is the meaning of my being here? Not in the casual sense of being “present” in a moment, but the meaning of the sum of my existence, my actions, my ephemeral presence in the vastness of the universe. It questions the meaning of being in this universe with its indifferent stars and impossible distances, and my fragile, ephemeral self within it.

A self so easily erased, yet it is so persistent in asking what the meaning of its existence is.

What do my actions matter in a cosmos that will outlive not only without me, but without the memory of me being here, and also without my own memory of the memory of me being here? I know that most of my daily acts — the emails I write, the groceries I carry, the small kindnesses or the thoughtless dismissals — will dissolve into nothing. And yet, I also know that if I am lucky some actions will ripple forward, may exist beyond my own existence in the conscious of few for a while. A word of encouragement might steer someone’s life. A thought, an idea, I proposed may linger for a while. The consequences of some threads of actions I may leave behind may be longer lived than the self that spun them.

And yet even that notion also brings a strange angst. Legacy may endure, but not in a way that sustains the self it is now. I will not be around to know about my legacy, if any. The self that reflects now — the one asking these questions — will not survive to witness the part of the legacy that may live on. One day, there will be no “me” to know that I ever was. No flicker of awareness to recall these musings, or that I wrote these words.

And so, I find myself asking, again and again: What is the meaning of this arc? From birth into awareness, through the blossoming of selfhood and an identity, into the slow erosion of biology, and finally, into the nothingness of death. Does it signify anything? Is it just a flicker of light before the dark, or is there some quiet thread of meaning running through it all?

I often think of my efforts to prepare for the future — my savings, my plans for retirement, my cautious restraint in spending as though frugality was a shield against mortality. As though, I could bargain with time by being prudent. Yet I know that unspent money buys nothing in the beyond. The pension stops with my last breath.

What is it I am hoping to gain from this ceaseless introspection? What hidden nugget of wisdom lies buried beneath the layers of thought and questioning to be discovered? I do not claim to know its full shape, but I sense its outline. I suspect that the wisdom I seek is not a tidy answer but a shift in perspective — a way of being that brings peace even in the face of impermanence. A peace with the thought that one day, there will be no “me” to know that I ever was.

Perhaps I hope to reach a state where questions about meaning related to being and then not being will no longer surface all the time. A clarity that the self will no longer strain toward finding a meaning but can rest without having one. A stillness not born of ignorance or apathy, but of understanding that further questioning is necessary.

I imagine that kind of understanding would not erase mortality, but soften the emptiness, the cynicism, the nihilism it can create. It would not pretend that legacy can preserve the self, but it might reveal that preservation was never a goal in the mechanics and lexicon of the universe. The point, perhaps, is simply to live — fully, attentively, curiously — within the frame of a life destined to vanish. I hope to get to the point where that wisdom could be put into daily action.

And so, I sit here, letting the tides rise and fall, letting the questions come and go. I do not yet have the actionable wisdom I seek. I am not yet a still pond; I am still stirred water.

If twenty years from now I am still sitting here, I hope I will have found a little more of that clarity. I hope I will have learned to live with mortality not as an adversary, but more as a reminder: that every day is a gift because any day it can end.

And if I am not sitting here twenty years from now — if my awareness has already faded into the vast quiet of non-being — then let it be said that along the journey while I was here, I asked the questions. I sought the meaning. I tried, with all my limited understanding, to live a life worthy of its impermanence.

In the end, I hope this restless introspection will find a home — not in an answer that silences mystery, but in a perspective that lets mystery be a livable mystery. And once there, perhaps I will be home; I will have my Nirvana. Not by gaining permanence, but by feeling connected, and thereby becoming eternal to the extent the universe is eternal. Until then…

Ciao, and thanks for reading.