A coffee cup leaves a ring on the table. The ring is both evidence of presence and evidence of absence: the cup was here, the cup is gone, and what remains is neither the thing nor its disappearance, only the fact that it happened. This is how existence works.
Impermanence serves as the condition for stability rather than its threat. The tree that never shed leaves would suffocate under its own abundance. The river that refused to flow would become a stagnant pond. What we call "settled" is just a particular rhythm of change, slower perhaps, more patterned, yet still entirely composed of transformation.
Consider the act of making a bed. You know you'll unmake it tonight. You know these sheets will need washing. Yet the gesture of smoothing the duvet, arranging the pillows creates a momentary architecture of care. The dwelling happens in full knowledge of its undoing. You inhabit fully not despite the impermanence, through it.
This differs from resignation. Resignation says: "Nothing lasts, so nothing matters." The coffee ring matters. The made bed matters. They matter as dissolutions in progress, finding their significance in their very temporariness.
Language itself demonstrates this. When you speak, each word dissolves into the next. If any word tried to persist, if "the" refused to yield to "coffee", there would be no sentence, no meaning. The meaning emerges from the structured disappearing, from forms that hold themselves just long enough to give way.
The same with thought. A thought that won't release becomes obsession. A thought that never stabilises at all cannot be examined, worked with, built upon. Thinking requires both the crystallisation and the dissolution, neither privileged over the other.
Nomadic life makes visible what settled life obscures: all rootedness is temporary ritual, all belonging is practised rather than possessed. The person who lives in one house for forty years also dwells in transience. Cells replace themselves, relationships evolve, the house itself ages. They've simply organised their dissolution differently.
You cannot opt out of this interpenetration. You can only pretend it's not happening, or you can work with it. Working with it means recognising that when you commit to something, a project, a place, a practice, you're entering into a particular relationship with impermanence. You're saying: "I will be here while I'm here." Which is the only kind of being here that exists.
The definite not quite describes the recognition that extremes never existed. There is no absolute stability, no pure dissolution. There is only this: forms that hold and release, anchor and dissolve, in patterns so interpenetrated they cannot be separated even conceptually.
The coffee ring gets wiped away. The table eventually goes to the landfill. Right now, in this moment, there is the fact of the ring. Definite. And also not quite. Both. Always.