I’m falling apart.

This has always been the case, but I’ve noticed it more lately because my family is moving. Our possessions, fresh out of cardboard boxes, are a random scatter of stuff. It’s as if our former home has dissolved.

The house we’re moving into is also dissolving. It’s old; we’ve been told that some of the foundation stones were dragged here by horses. Since then, maintenance has been…patchy. The roof, insulation, heating, and innumerable other things are in various stages of dissolution.

“Well,” I thought yesterday after moving approximately four billion heavy boxes, “at least all this work will make me feel young and strong!” Then I unpacked a mirror and noticed that my body, whatever its size and strength, is now basically a bag of wrinkles filled with veins. 

As I said: falling apart.

But here’s the thing: I don’t necessarily consider dissolving a problem. I actually find it kind of wonderful—if I stay in the right mindset. That’s a little mental trick  that I believe can help us all experience much less suffering, much more joy.

Why Learn to Dissolve?

The second law of thermodynamics spells it out: Everything is always proceeding toward disorder. The physical universe is getting more and more chaotic, all the time. Leave a house to nature’s devices, and it will always fall apart; it will never get tidier and more solid.

You’ve probably lived through dissolutions in your own life. Houses and bodies aren’t the only things that fall apart. So do lives, jobs, industries, nations, political systems, economies.

Most of us don’t like this. We crave stability and permanence. I think I’ve looked at everything I ever loved—my former homes, my new babies, my younger body, my business at its best—and silently begged them, “Don’t change.”

But they did. 

Of course they did. 

They had to. 

Everything dissolves.

If we don’t learn to accept this, we live in perpetual resistance and anxiety. We spend every ounce of strength trying to keep things the way they are, dammit, as every person, situation, and object continuously morphs and fades. 

This struggle against entropy, almost universal among humans, lies near the core of psychological suffering. It makes us perpetually grasping and anxious, with a deathgrip on denial. 

The only way out of this suffering is to double down. Let the resistance to dissolving be another thing that dissolves. 

 

Dissolving the Fear of Dissolving: Flow 

The first thing that helps me stay calm with dissolution is to think of it as flow. Flow is always about new things replacing old things: new molecules coming in while others disintegrate. “Flow” is also the word psychologists use to describe a mental state of joyful fascination. It’s the most positive thing we can experience.

That’s why I can honestly say I’ve been falling apart as long as I’ve existed. Every seven years, each of my atoms disappears, to be replaced by others. The baby I was—and the baby you were—dissolved long ago.

Of course they did.

They had to.

Everything dissolves.

Falling apart is part of flow, the reason flow is possible. 

Close your eyes and imagine a few things that flow. Rivers. Seasons. Tides. They constantly shift, which is how they constantly create new moments of beauty, new vistas, new reflections, new forms of earth and air and water and life.

Put your fingers in a flowing stream—isn’t the movement of water delicious? Feel a cool breeze on your face—isn’t the flow of air better than stagnation?

This is our sensory hint that dissolution is not simply annihilation. There’s something fundamentally important about it, something we sense at a primordial level.

Dissolve Our Culture’s Thinking: Let the Nonphysical Be Real

All physical objects fall apart. But most of our universe isn’t made of physical objects. We don’t know what it’s made of, but not anything we can observe or measure.

Physicists tell us that about 95% of the universe is not made of atoms. It’s not made of anything we understand. Scientists call it “dark matter,” “dark energy.” We only know it’s there because of its effects on the gravitational fields of things we can see and measure.

One physicist, Florian Neukart, believes that dark matter may be the memory of the universe: the informational record of everything that has ever happened, the “weight of information woven into space-time”

This requires believing that non-physical things are real. Everyday experience backs up this idea. Love, purpose, insight, wisdom, memories—these are all things, even if they can’t be measured.

Perhaps, as all material things dissolve, nonmaterial things—or no-things—are always being created. 

Maybe we aren’t here to keep our bodies fightin’ fit forever, but to use our physical existence to create experiences that aren’t constantly dissolving, but constantly coming into existence.

Dissolving Into Wonder

Just contemplating this is enough to make me slow down, put away my worries, and ponder new possible versions of reality that feel exciting and amazing. The constant change of my life is fascinating when I think of it as simultaneously dissolving and creating. 

Like our hands, our hearts and minds can’t do much if they’re always clenched, trying to keep things from leaving or changing. 

When we let go of our assumptions and simply observe the universe around us, what looked like a universe doomed to destruction becomes a universe in constant flow. 

Like the steps in a dance, like the plot of a story, like the resolving chord that makes a song beautiful, letting go and embracing the process of dissolution allows us to perceive new beauty, neverending joy. 

From this perspective, the world makes a new kind of sense. Hardship, loss, grief, all show themselves as simultaneously destructive and creative.

So yes, I am falling apart.

So are we all.

Of course we are.

We have to.

But with each dissolution, new versions of us are forming. We are caterpillars becoming butterflies not just once, but many times in a single life. 

So as we watch everything fall apart—the status quo, the places we lived, the shape of society itself—don’t despair. The question, “How do I stop all these changes?” is hopeless. 

But there is another question that isn’t hopeless. It is hope itself. 

As you watch yourself dissolve, find what isn’t dissolving. Lean into the aspect of yourself that isn’t physical: your love, excitement, sorrow, mystery. When you find that aspect of yourself, notice how it loves flow. Ask it the question that takes you deeper into the mystery. Ask it, “What am I becoming?”