Where I live, in northern New England, the natural world is in a state of radical transition from winter to spring, from hibernation to preparing for new life, from monochromatic landscapes to an explosion of yellows, greens, and pinks. Especially in northern climate zones the changing seasons are a radical reminder of the universality of the fact of impermanence. If you don’t like the weather today, just wait a minute; the green shoots coming up in the garden today may well be covered with four inches of new snow tomorrow. There is no real point in asking why, or what it all means, all we can really know is that everything is in a constant process of change and transformation. As the Buddhist blogger James Ure has observed, winter offers the jewel of reflection. Spring offers black flies and strawberries.

All human life is also in a perpetual state of transition, although it is usually infinitely harder to account for it. My artist friend Greg, a painter of some distinction, has been trying to come to terms with the phenomena of transitions in the visual world. He recently wrote me to observe, “we are not aware of most of life’s major transitions until after they have occurred, and so we deal with them through a rearview mirror.” And, I might add, that rearview mirror is at best a flawed lens, one that obscures and distorts cause and effect, and seeks reassuring patterns where more often than not none really exists.

Even the most obvious transitions are full of mystery. I can no more really understand birth or death, marriage or divorce, career advancement or retirement, the pubertal transformation of kids or the almost imperceptible decline in one’s faculties in ageing than I can fully imagine that the dormant apple tree in my yard will be bowed over with fruit in August. How much more difficult to comprehend the almost invisible transitions in relationships. Last year my neighbor was surrounded by his young family as he spent long late winter days in his sugar house converting gallons of maple sap to pints and quarts of maple syrup. This year he stands alone in his sugar house – his dreams also evaporated; another disposable marriage.

A further difficulty with the rearview mirror is that it tells us pretty nearly nothing about the future. Last summer it rained here almost every day and you couldn’t grow a tomato to save your life. This year could very well be dry as a bone, and you won’t be able to grow a tomato to save your life. Or maybe this year will produce tomatoes in brilliant red abundance. Who knows?

The bottom has dropped out of the building trades around here. Nobody has the optimism it takes to dare invest in a new kitchen; so fleets of pickup trucks sit idle in driveways, and they say that liquor sales are the only bright spot in the retail economy. With the disappeared work has gone the sustaining daily pride of skillful accomplishment. Work’s routine camaraderie and competition have been replaced by uncertainty about where the next truck payment is going to come from. A youngster I talked with the other day wondered out loud what the point was of staying in school; what is it like these days to think about planning a life, a family, together? The center is wobbling around its axis.

And that is surely the downside to all this talk about impermanence, transition, and transformation. They tell me that in Chinese the characters that write the word crisis can also be read as the word opportunity. And I suppose that is the fun of retrospection. If they hadn’t downsized me at my last job, I never would have discovered how much I enjoy this new life that I have crafted for myself. Had I not been booted out of that previous relationship, I would never have met you. Before I had that first heart attack I don’t think I really understood how important my wife, my kids, my friends really are to me.

Comforting perspective? Thank that rearview mirror. The future, however, is daunting. As Edgar Allan Poe once observed, the monumental events in a man’s life are few – birth, marriage, death, and the terror in-between. I have long suspected that the terror in-between is the engine that powers much of our anger and sleepless nights.

The only answer that I have been able to come up with that makes any sense (to me anyway) is to demand of yourself to PAY CLOSE ATTENTION; to be mindful and respectful of the natural world, to cultivate a wide universe of relationships, and to hold dear to your heart the philosophical and religious truths that sustain you. It is equally hard to let go of the illusion of permanence when things are good, as it is to recognize that the future is full of infinite possibilities, when everything seems stuck in the middle of a black and white winter.

Robert Frost’s Dust of Snow (1923) sums this up for me.

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.

Dr. C. Peter Bankart is the author of Freeing the Angry Mind: How Men Can Use Mindfulness and Reason to Save Their Lives and Relationships.