A coffee cup leaves a ring on the table: the cup was here, the cup is gone, and the ring is the plain fact that it happened. Much of what lasts is like this, a mark left by something already on its way out.
What we call settled is only a slower rhythm of change, more patterned and more forgiving, and still made entirely of things passing through. Someone who has lived in one house for forty years is living in transience too, only more slowly: the paint goes, the boiler is replaced twice, the hall carpet keeps the dents of a piano sold years ago, and the love in the house keeps changing shape.
Making a bed you will unmake tonight, with sheets that will need washing by the end of the week, is a small piece of care built in full knowledge of its undoing. You smooth the duvet anyway, and square the pillows, and the room is better for the few hours it lasts.
A sentence works on the same terms. Each word has to give way to the next for a sentence to happen at all; a word that refused to yield would be a held note going nowhere. Something similar holds for thought: one that will not let go hardens into obsession, and one that never settles cannot be held still long enough to use. The meaning is in the holding and the letting go together.
Resignation hears all this and concludes that nothing matters. The ring, the made bed and the dents in the carpet say otherwise; they matter while they last, and some of them for a long while after. Committing to a place or a person is promising to care for it while everything changes, yourself included.