Anicca and the dance of quiet change
By Helen Patterson
As September winds down, I’ve been reminded of something I’ve always known but often try to tuck away: the most powerful change is usually the quietest kind. Not every shift arrives with big announcements, launches, or applause. Some work like groundwater: out of sight, steady, reshaping things underneath until one day the surface feels different and we’re not sure why.
This is the inner kind of change, the stuff no one sees. It shows up in how we think, how we respond, and most of all, how we let go. It’s subtle and unspectacular: the half-second breath before a tricky reply, the softer tone in a tense room, the old stories about who we are that finally stop fitting.
In Buddhism, this is called anicca, a Pali word that translates to impermanence. It’s a simple reminder that nothing is fixed, no matter how much the mind wants to hold on to what it likes and push away what it doesn’t. Anicca invites us to remember that we aren’t carved in stone, that we are unfolding beings. Birth, death, endings, beginnings… These aren’t interruptions to life, they’re the very grammar of it. Change is the language life speaks through us.
Why quiet change matters
Have you noticed how good our society is at celebrating the most obvious and loudest types of change? Promotions, product releases, restructures: these things always deserve big parties and shiny newsletters. To some extent, fair enough. But the movements that enable those outward shifts are often quieter and so much more internal. They’re the micro-adjustments in attention and intention that compound over time, the distance between being triggered and choosing peace, the widening of our capacity to hold discomfort, and the softening of certainty into curiosity.
I have recently realized that ignoring this level of change narrows our vision and veils the truth. It convinces us that transformation must be dramatic or visible to be real. Meanwhile, the most consequential shifts are happening in the background: in mindsets, in muscles of attention, in our relationship with control.
This is why I’m so drawn to the simple logic Buddhism offers. Anicca gives us a different question to ask. If everything is moving, then it’s not “How do I lock this in?” but “How do I move with it?” Not “How do I stop change?” but “How do I get skillful at it?”
The friction of wanting things to stay
If impermanence is the fabric of things, then why do we suffer? Because we desire, and therefore we grasp, cling and hold onto the objects of our desire, says Buddhism. We want what pleases us to last and what pains us to pass quickly, and we try to bargain with the river. We resist endings, delay beginnings, and hold our breath between the two. The result is strain: against time, against others, and most importantly, against ourselves.
The workplace often becomes the perfect playground for this universal yearning we have to control and predict. So we build plans, roadmaps, policies (all necessary containers) and then secretly hope they will protect us from the volatility of being alive. But every plan sits in a living context: markets move, people change, teams evolve. When we treat change as an aberration, we posture against reality itself. When we treat change as the baseline, we posture towards responsiveness.
So what does accepting impermanence actually look like day-to-day?
The pause becomes a practice. You notice the tiny window between stimulus and response and choose to occupy it more often. A hot reaction cools into a considered reply.
The narrative updates. “I must fix everything” becomes “I can be with what is here and now, and choose to act with clarity.” The shift is small, the consequences are huge.
Attachment softens. You still care, but you cling less. You hold roles, projects, and outcomes with open palms, you honour them without identifying with them. This doesn’t make you passive, it makes you available.
Boundaries clarify. Saying no stops feeling like failure and begins to feel like stewardship of your attention, your energy, your integrity.
Attention refines. You start noticing that you become more aware. The texture of your breath, the slight tightening in your shoulders at a certain name in your inbox. Awareness becomes information you can work with.
None of these are headline moments, and yet they create a ripple effect, they change the quality of the day, the team, and the culture as a whole.
Leadership as stewardship of change
If leadership needed a fresh job description, I’d offer this one: leadership is stewarding the movement of things. The movement is what matters. A leader who shifts from command-and-control to sense-and-respond is a leader who notices subtle currents (morale dipping, direction fuzzing, collective fatigue) and steps in earlier and with more care.
And here’s the paradox: stability doesn’t come from resisting change, it comes from being reliable inside it. People trust leaders who are consistent in presence, not in pretending circumstances won’t shift.
That also means telling the truth about flux, being brave enough to admit that confidence isn’t certainty, but rather clarity about the next faithful step. In a world full of variables, offering the calm of “Here’s what we’re seeing; here’s what we’re trying; here’s how we’ll learn” is grown-up leadership.
The intimacy of letting go
We often frame letting go as loss. And sometimes, it can be. But it’s also intimacy with reality. To release something is to acknowledge the very nature of that thing: temporary. We let go of the meeting that’s past its use, the self-story that keeps us small, the grip on outcomes that were never ours to guarantee. What’s left isn’t emptiness, but space. Space to create, to invite freedom, and to welcome surrender as an act of participation. In other words, we stop trying to push against the river and, instead, learn how to swim.
And if all of this sounds lovely in theory but you aren’t convinced, then try this simple practice:
Begin with one conscious breath.
Ask: “What is changing in me today? What is changing around me?”
Start inside. Notice your state, your stories, your body. The things you want to hold on to, the things you want to get rid off.
Then look outside. Notice the context, the people, the pace of life unfolding. Is the outside world matching my inner world? Are things changing outside as much as they are within?
Then breathe again.
End with thanks: for something that began, something that ended, and the thread that linked them.
Becoming the change
Anicca doesn’t ask us to like change. It asks us to recognise that we are change: that thoughts, roles, relationships, and identities are all living processes. When impermanence stops being the enemy and becomes the companion, something softens. Our days shift from defending fixed positions to expressing what feels true and useful in the present moment.
If there were only one thing you had to take away from this blog, let it be this: We’re never stuck, we’re always moving. Quietly, continuously, sometimes invisibly, but moving nonetheless. Change isn’t an interruption to life, it’s simply the way life expresses itself best.