Impermanence

     Utnapishtim's declaration that "There is no permanence" means for humans that our world is never constant, and we are always forced to adjust to it. This is because nature is always changing (this can be seen with the ice ages and the climate change that enabled agriculture to develop), and we need to adjust to nature or else we will die off as a species. As people our minds are always developing and our bodies are always changing to fit the new demands of our environment. Our world illustrates this impermanence in big ways like the consistent changing of language and in smaller ones like how no two days are exactly the same. Even Enkidu, who was created by the gods as the only creature who could challenge part-deity Gilgamesh, had to leave the earth and die.

    How people get up and go about their business with this knowledge of impermanence is certainly not an easy question to answer. I think a lot of people consciously ignore the fact that they will die some day. This makes it much easier to live and allows us to feel hopeful even though we know in the grand scheme of things we might not be consequential. Our human minds have a difficult time processing that information, so we just block it out to avoid spiraling into a depressed state. This makes ignoring our mortality the only way we can be productive. If the entire human population suddenly decided that it isn't worth doing anything because we will all die eventually the species would probably die. One of our primary goals as people is to keep humanity going. This makes giving up because of our mortality a selfish act in the long term.

    I would say that we get our meaning in life from the legacy we leave on the world. As Gilgamesh discovers at the end of his journey, while individual humans cannot live forever humanity can. To some level the rest of us humans comprehend this, so when we go about our daily lives a lot of us are hoping to leave a lasting impact on the world we will inevitably leave behind. In the modern world people like Nikola Tesla and Alexander Graham Bell have long passed, but their contributions to our world will probably never be forgotten. Us mortal humans can create a sense of order in our world by giving ourselves schedules to follow and goals to achieve. By providing ourselves with tasks to complete we can gain some type of control over an otherwise uncontrollable world. It is true that sometimes, as Gilgamesh learned through Enkidu's death, we cannot control what fate befalls us or are loved ones. However, we can control how we react to events out of our control. While Gilgamesh chose to seek a way to avoid death entirely, many of us can restore a sense of order to our lives by returning from such tragedies at peace and ready to live our lives the way we want to. We can create eternal life in our own world by living on in the memory of the people to come after us. Most of us don't have an entire city to live through like Gilgamesh did with Uruk, but we can live on in spirit on smaller scales with people like our children or our close friends. As long as we are remembered and loved we are not truly dead.