This, Too, Shall Pass: reflections on impermanence and loss from reading A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle

Part four of five in a series of reflections on Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth

In the last post, I reflected on the pain-body and the challenge of awakening in everyday life. Writing that brought out vulnerability, which left me emotionally exhausted. But it was also cathartic calling out my ego and my pain-body, as if writing about them was a way to disempower them.

This time, I found myself confronted by one of Tolle’s simplest yet most profound reminders: “This, too, shall pass.” As I read, that truth echoed through my own experience of grief, distance, and impermanence.

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The book’s eighth chapter is about cultivating inner spaciousness, a state of openness and presence that allows life to move through us without clinging or resistance. Tolle contrasts life lived in unconscious identification with form (objects, roles, emotions, problems) with life lived from awareness of the space around and within things.

He explains that when we stop over-identifying with form, we discover an inner stillness that isn’t dependent on circumstances. This is where freedom lives: in the ability to hold joy, pain, success, and loss in awareness, knowing they are temporary expressions of form.

That’s where the phrase “This, too, shall pass” comes in. For Tolle, it’s not just comfort in difficult times. It’s also a reminder in good times that all forms are transient. Recognizing this isn’t depressing; it’s freeing. It helps us stay rooted in the eternal Now, rather than grasping or resisting life’s movements.

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This, too, shall pass.

How coincidental it was for me to go experience reading this chapter in the span of days in August when two kittens back home under my parents’ care have passed away, and another is fading because of the viral infection that spread among them.

He would later run away from home, leaving my parents with the uncertainty of whether or not he’s alive—and if, indeed, he has passed, where his body could be.

I think of the love I have for that pet who’s missing and quite possibly dead, and how little time I got to spend with him before I moved away and started a new chapter in my life.

His life, too, shall pass (or has passed).

So, going through this eighth chapter felt like an indescribable wave of the phrase’s truth.

I think about the time and effort that went into closing the distance and the challenges of the immigration process. And it did, as all things do: this, too, shall pass.

I think of the times I spent with loved ones before I left, now bargaining with the universe for more, knowing at last that all moments, past and present, answer the same refrain: this, too, shall pass.

I spent a part of this year looking so much into the goal of Closing The Distance that I forgot to be present in other ways.

I’m now in a place where I could meet situations with the wisdom of “This, too, shall pass.”

This holding pattern and adjustment period I’m in? This, too, shall pass.

The childhood of the children of our loved ones? Those, too, shall pass.

Whatever I go through in life will pass, so I must appreciate the simple, see the beauty, and feel loving kindness.

Now that I know there’s freedom in accepting the impermanences that come with life—mere existence—I can be still.

“To be still is to be conscious without thought,” Tolle writes. “You are never more essentially, more deeply yourself than when you are still.”

And for someone who’s spent much of her days caught in the web of her thoughts and anxieties, learning this is so fucking freeing.

In the final post of this series coming out next week, I’ll explore how presence and awareness translate into action—how awakening doesn’t just quiet the mind, but reshapes the way we move through the world, and how each of us can contribute, in small but meaningful ways, to the emergence of a new earth.

Before you go, I’d love to read in the comments below: where do you notice impermanence in your own life?