The Impossible Doubleness of Impermanence and Memory
Something is ending. Many somethings, all at once. That’s the scary, unavoidable nature of life. It’s almost too big to talk about, the constant uncertainty and impermanence we live with at all times. And our awareness of change and loss only grows more poignant as we age. Uncertainty is not knowing what happens next; impermanence is knowing full-well that everything you have or built will eventually end. And while much uncertainty asks you to prepare for loss, a kind of anticipatory grief, impermanence asks you to grieve in real-time.
I try to push back on the ego of the idea that there’s more change in the world now than ever before. Every generation has faced immeasurable change and loss, more than I can imagine. However, I am thinking a lot about the rate and velocity of change these days. It seems like in the past, personal and societal shifts came in waves. Now it all just keeps accelerating, with little to no interim, and no space between to integrate or create any kind of coherence for ourselves.
Automation, commerce, connectivity, communication—these are consequential things, yet artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies are reshaping them completely and consistently. For some, it might feel like AI is changing our very identity, not just as individuals but as a whole. Many of the jobs our parents had, that we have now, won’t exist in thirty years. Maybe less. That’s a real loss to grapple with.
Then there’s aging itself and everything that comes with it, like navigating illness or the loss of loved ones. Some of us, just like many of our predecessors, have become caregivers to our own parents. And while navigating aging, mortality, and even some level of parent-child role reversal aren’t new, what is new is navigating these things in the same stretch of life where the velocity of change, including AI, is reshaping everything else. It is part of what makes this moment so multidimensional.
All of this is a grief process, and managing grief, whether it’s anticipatory or not, can’t be separated from what it means to lead effectively or be a successful leader. Leaders are being asked to embody competence and certainty while processing change and losses that, in many cases, they haven’t been given the time or space to name.
The Fallibility and Flexibility of Memory
My own experiences are making me more aware of impermanence. In 2024, my mom was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), though she’d been showing symptoms since 2019. With this rare type of dementia, damage to the frontal and/or temporal lobes of the brain can lead to significant personality changes. Some people act completely out of character, lose their sense of empathy, and struggle with decisions, comprehension, and movement. She’s also been losing her memory, so she doesn’t always remember who I am. Or she seems to remember but still feels far away or unfamiliar. Then there are days when it seems like she’s aging backwards, reverting to a younger version of herself, someone I’ve never met before.
Throughout the caregiving process, a responsibility I share with my dad and my sister, I’ve tried using many of the tools that were helpful in raising my own children. Things like logic, structure, gentle correction, rewards, and reassurance. These strategies worked for a time, but they are growing less useful as her dementia progresses.
Lately, what seems to work is something both simple and infinitely complex: I choose to meet her in her reality. I aim to put aside who I think she is, should be, or has been to me in the past. I try not to argue with her, or convince her that she’s my mom, or that she’s 80 years old, or that she’s been married to my dad for almost 57 years. I let her take the lead, and I try to stay curious about who she’ll be on any given day.
I don’t always manage this gracefully. Far from it. Some days I want so badly for my mom’s reality to bend toward mine, just for a minute, that I miss the chance to connect at all. And every time trying to align our narratives doesn’t work, I have to let go of wanting them to, again. Release and re-engage. It’s the same kind of practice I wrote about in my exploration of how to be in dialogue with your body.
How Do We Navigate an Uncertain, Impermanent Life
I’ve started compiling my thoughts on what we, as leaders and as humans, can lean into to navigate this uncertain, impermanent life. I’m naming the following concepts—acceptance, presence, and connection—as if they are separate, but the separation between them is mostly fiction, a way of making something with permeable boundaries easier to distinguish. It’s the same way when we learn about atoms, we draw them up on the chalkboard with a hard shell, even though there’s nothing solid there at all. It’s just easier to visualize and grasp!
1. Acceptance
At this point, I’ve mostly let go of trying to convince my mom of where, when, and who she is. Of who I am. Although when she doesn’t recognize me or isn’t happy to see me, I sometimes still have the urge to “fix” or “do” something to rebuild our connection within the realm of logic and reason. Acceptance sounds so final, like some kind of ultimate destination, but it’s a choice you have to make again and again, agreeing to what’s true in any given moment.
Some mornings I just have to say it out loud, plainly, before I do anything else: she might not know me today. Or she might not want me to be there. Naming it, even in a sentence this small, does help. And when I can actually let go instead of just performing letting go, a deeper kind of connection can happen. (Although some days, you only have the capacity to fake it till you make it, and there’s nothing wrong with that.)
Acceptance is also one of the principles of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, developed and adapted by the Gracie family in 1920. It says that in cases where the outcome is inevitable, it’s better to yield than resist. Resisting what you can’t change costs energy you’ll need for what you can. And yielding has its own advantage. The first person to accept that something is inevitable is also the first person to start preparing their mind and body for whatever comes next. This version of acceptance isn’t passive. It’s closer to a creative act. You purposely choose to stop fighting one thing, then shift that energy to build something else. That is a conscious and embodied decision.
My mom’s diagnosis is a fight I can’t win. Neither is the growing unreliability or irrelevance of memory in general. My own included. But how I choose to show up each morning, whether I keep trying, keep accepting and re-accepting (release and re-engage), keep turning toward her instead of away: that fight is still mine. “Fight” might not even be the right word, because my goal is not always to try harder, but to resist less.
2. Presence
Resisting less requires a willingness to be present, to exist outside the push and pull of memory and imagination. It reminds me how some people say anxiety is a future-oriented state, while depression is focused on the past. The third option, presence, is like the refusal to be pulled in either direction. It’s the choice to stay exactly where you are, even when where you are is incredibly uncertain or uncomfortable.
While it can feel like a cerebral concept, presence often starts in the body. That might mean exhaling, unclenching, and lovingly reminding your system not to brace for impact. Or checking in with your five senses as a way to center yourself in the here and now. With my mom, it’s only after I do this that I can even attempt to be present, letting our two versions of reality, which can sometimes feel like two completely different timelines, co-exist without the preconceived notion that mine is better or right.
Staying in that place is a challenge. Old wounds, fear and sadness I haven’t fully metabolized yet, often show up sideways as impatience with her or with myself. That’s my memory tugging at the moment, or my imagination running wild about what the days ahead might look like. And the thing about pre-existing relationships, particularly ones with long and complicated histories, is that this kind of expectation is everywhere. Not just about how things should be, or would be, but how they could be if any one thing was different. When I find myself going there, I try to name that state of mind, out loud or on paper. Only then can I set it aside.
3. Connection
Impermanence feels like the threat of severed connection, and connection is also the thing that makes us feel whole. My mom speaks primarily in energy now instead of words or syntax. That’s why watching her with my eighteen-month-old grand-niece, Penelope, is so tender. These are two people in completely different phases of life, but when they see each other, it is pure recognition and delight. Like they’re on the same frequency. Something connects that has less to do with memory and more to do with that energetic exchange. It’s also why I show her videos of my dog Luca when I visit. I’m not doing it to distract her, but to create or rekindle a connection. If these experiences have taught me anything, it is that a deeper kind of connection exists outside of memory and time.
That mysterious thing though, whatever it might be, isn’t something I can always access on command. So in moments of doubt, I ask myself a specific question: “What is my no-regrets move?” (Shout up to my friend and colleague Renee Cullinan who shared this question). Ultimately, making a no-regrets move is about choice and intentionality. Don’t let an important choice pass you by without conscious thought about what you want. Making it might require you to picture yourself further down the road, in a rocking chair even, reflecting on the choices you would never take back.
With my mom, the no-regrets move is really about two things: 1) preparing for connection and 2) re-setting when that connection is lost. Before I’m even with her, I have to make a real choice about whether I have the capacity or the fortitude to be there. If I don’t think I have what it takes on any given day, I no longer force myself to go. That has taken a lot of practice. And it’s a difficult choice to make when you know time is limited, but I can better recognize now when it’s the choice that will ultimately create connection vs. disconnection.
Living Inside of Life’s Contradictions
The current that underlies all of these practices is the resolve not to reconcile the impossible doubleness of life. That doubleness is many things, like the way that fulfillment is not an absence of negative emotions but the ability to oscillate between good and bad, peace and chaos, striving and contentment. Nestled inside almost every loss is a gain. And vice versa. It’s the way that a new job is exciting, but it’s still the end of an old community. How coming of age leaves childhood behind. Or death invites us to reorganize and reinvent within our groups. To destroy one thing creates another. With everything bitter, there is something sweet.
Accepting both at once, the bitter and the sweet, the whole messy, ridiculous tangle of it, rather than picking one and calling it truth, is what lets us navigate uncertainty. That’s the opportunity waiting inside AI too, another one of life’s more recent contradictions. And I’m choosing to juxtapose my experience with my mom next to AI because it is fundamentally changing our identity in the world: what we’re for, what only we can do, and what it means to be human. It’s the end of one thing and the start of another.
It’s tempting to fall into one of two camps about AI, believing it is either ruinous or some kind of ultimate solution. But both perspectives, both expectations, are just a way of disengaging with something that isn’t finished. Something that has barely begun. A fixed stance, decided once and never revisited, doesn’t have room to keep up with something moving this fast and without pause.
Personally, I’ve been cautious with AI. And out of a desire to use it in a way that honors the work I do with my clients, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the potential pitfalls. Now, as I engage more and more, I’ve started to resonate with the idea that whatever AI becomes next will have something to do with whether we stay curious. Whether we accept it as something to nurture and connect with in its early stages, or neglect entirely, leaving it to others to, in essence, raise.
We need both that perspective and sense of responsibility.
I encourage people to practice acceptance with AI, though not blind acceptance; stay present and engaged, though not uninformed; and lean into human connection, not necessarily in protest of AI but as an example for it. I don’t know yet whether this new technology ends up deepening our capacity to connect or eroding it. Probably some of both. Will it change the world? Yes. It already has and will continue to do so. But there is something on the other side, and we have an impact on what that something looks like.
Being a Gentle Warrior
Doubleness and contradiction exist all around us when we start to notice it. For example, on the day I got my mom’s dementia diagnosis, I also earned my pink belt in Gracie Jiu Jitsu. It was a milestone that represented the completion of their Women’s Self-Defense Program, Women Empowered. The timing of these two events meant that shortly before I walked out onto the mat to test, a rigorous process that required precise technique and mental toughness, my father and I were holding each other in the parking lot, the epitome of vulnerability, only just starting to grieve.
For many years, I felt like I had to choose from moment to moment whether to be soft or strong. Hard or soft. But that day was a gift because it showed me a way to hold both at the same time. It’s why I’ve been working to build a sense of “wholeness” around the identity of “gentle warrior.” At this juncture in time, when the unknowns associated with AI, technology, and human identity are asking more of our leaders than ever before, that’s the same kind of integrated wholeness humanity needs. It’s the ability to be clear-eyed about what’s ending, soft enough to feel it all, and strong enough to persist with curiosity. Because nothing—not our days, our selves, even our most life-changing losses—none of these will ever resolve into one thing.
