Why things should be allowed to die
- Shamalee de Silva Parizeau
- May 12
- 2 min read
What Vesak lanterns teach us and when preservation becomes pathology
Walking past a school just before the Buddhist Vesak festival, I saw a group of young girls hang up lanterns with covers of transparent polymer. On the news, I saw coverage of the army dressing up the streets for Vesak with elaborately made lanterns, all protected from the elements by covers of plastic. With that, they reduced the profound lesson of the Vesak lantern and limited it to mere ornamentation.
Vesak lanterns, traditionally made from bamboo and fragile tissue paper, carried the lesson of impermanence. As children, making a Vesak lantern—painstakingly tying bamboo pieces together—you learned about geometry as much as paper craft. It took days of cutting patterns and shapes and pasting them with a sticky homemade glue of flour and water. These were labours of love. But the lesson of the lanterns only revealed itself once they were hung outside, exposed to the elements. The Vesak festival, celebrated in the monsoony month of May, inevitably included rains. Nothing taught the Buddhist philosophy of impermanence like discovering the lantern you built, destroyed by rain. What was once loved and luminous now hung limp, skeletal, and beyond repair. It was a tradition that made the day after Vesak into a life lesson. Past the fairy tales, you had to reconcile with the reality of being alive. You came to understand that life and death weren’t opposing forces, but parts of the same process.
Covering this important lesson in plastic is a symptom of the deeper confusion of our time: the need to preserve what was never meant to last in an obstinate and unconscious drive to outsmart death.
Today, everything is wrapped in polymer sleeves. Earphones. Fruits. Flowers. Leftovers. Even the things that should be allowed to wither—old letters, sketchbooks, bills—are now preserved past their timeline. We keep birthday balloons. We vacuum-seal sentiments. We embalm objects not because they are precious, but because we can.
This isn’t preservation. This is pathology.
Plastic reflects our unspoken belief that decay is a problem. That entropy is failure. That change is loss. But when we try to keep the past intact, we keep the present from moving. We try to keep the earth from smelling like earth. We try to turn the world into a museum of itself.
But what if we allowed things to soften? To shift? To be held for a while, then returned to the soil?
Not everything needs to be preserved.
Things need to be used.
Things need to end.
Things need to break down, to feed what comes next.
And perhaps the small return can begin—with one thing left uncovered. One child allowed to build a lantern that falls apart. One memory allowed to fade, so it can be reborn differently. We can choose to not plastic-coat rituals that honour impermanence.
Preservation is not the same as reverence. Stories don’t need to last forever to mean something.
