The Hundred-Year Perspective

“It was said of Abbot Agatho that for three years he carried a stone in his mouth until he learned to be silent.”
—Wisdom of the Desert

There is a terrific scene in the Bernardo Bertolucci film Little Buddha in which a child asks a Tibetan lama the meaning of impermanence. “See all these people,” the lama said, “and all the people everywhere in the world today. In a hundred years, we’ll all be dead. That’s impermanence.”

For some reason I awoke in the middle of the night last evening with a vivid sense of my own mortality. This was not particularly unusual or disturbing. This happens to me from time to time, and I usually see this kind of mindfulness as a gift. I feel fortunate to be reminded that I am often focused on the wrong things.

All the people with whom we have conflict and with whom we play out our human drama, and all the sources of our stress and difficulty, are just as impermanent as we are. All the things that cause us mental suffering and anguish are fading phenomena. One hundred years from now, very little of the specifics of what we do will matter at all. That we were stuck in a traffic jam, that we had the flu this week, that we had some problem at work, none of this will matter in a hundred years. For that matter, where we worked will probably not matter in a hundred years.

But this shouldn’t be interpreted with nihilistic despair. To the contrary, there are indeed many things we do which will matter a hundred years from now. The peace and justice we create in the world, the legacy of compassion and understanding that we demonstrate toward others, will create a ripple effect that will bear fruit for centuries to come. Perhaps we could say that what we do matters less than how we do it. Or, put another way, perhaps we should view our daily activities from this hundred-year perspective, and look for those small deeds that will in fact last that long, and not worry so much about the things that will be forgotten tomorrow—or even five minutes from now.

Abbot Agatho’s practice of silence is a wonderful example. Clearly, he did speak occasionally (we have the great legacy of his simple teachings in books like Wisdom of the Desert). But by practicing silence most of the time, he learned to make his words count when he did speak, and didn’t waste his breath or time on making noise that would quickly be swallowed up in the abyss of impermanence. And here are the words that were left, still counting nearly two millennia later.