Temporarily...

   This morning, I decided to do meditation before going out to work-something I am not accustomed to. I found that my spine was much more supportive to my practice in the mornings, leading me to believe that my posture likely suffers during the day from a lot of sitting. In addition, morning meditation seems to have the added advantage of being easier to sustain, as there are much fewer wandering thoughts in the morning. Although I wasn't able to sustain the stillness of mind for very long, the morning meditation very much did help me.
    Although many books have been written about Buddhist concepts such as impermanence and emptiness, I would have to say that it's only through dedicated practice of a specific method in mediation that these concepts have meaning. Why is that? I think it's because none of these are real concepts at all, but are more similar to ways of being. For instance, Francis Cook remarks, "Primarily, the doctrine of emptiness is an attack on the conceptual mode of grasping the world. It says that although words and concepts are normally valid for purposes of accomplishing our business, they are totally invalid from the standpoint of the highest truth." (p.42) If emptiness is more of a way of seeing than a fixed concept, it is nearly impossible to know emptiness simply through a concept. To do so is to try to fix something that was never meant to even be a 'thing' to begin with. Of course, one has to use language to be able to get emptiness or understand its direction, but after that, the concept can just become another impediment.
    For example, if a person simply uses the word 'impermanence' to remind themselves that things are going to pass, they only add another concept which they believe is permanent. But even the concept itself is not permanent. It is conditioned, in fact. If a tiger were to suddenly run into the workplace and start chasing me, would the word 'impermanent' come to mind? It may or it may not, but it probably won't do me much good because it's a kind of distracting thought. If on the other hand, I had an insight into impermanence, it is no longer just a word or a thought. It is a mode of being where thoughts are able to come and go freely, because none are regarded as having a fixed duration or even continuing from one moment to the next. Each thought is gone as soon as it has arisen. So if I speak of the thought as 'changing', I am still assuming that it starts as one thing and simply changes to another. But again, the thought has already passed, so nothing is said to have changed.
     I say this because I sometimes think that having a calm mindset is much more important to  practice than calling up ideas or words from a book. While the latter are pointers that are quite important to practice, they are unable to capture the true experience of thoughts' instantaneously arising and perishing.
    I have also often heard people use impermanence as a way of consoling themselves: well, our lives are impermanent anyway, so why bother putting hopes in anything? But is this the true meaning of impermanence? The problem is that one secretly holds onto what she hopes to be permanent, while trying to defeat it with the thought that "all things are impermanent". But these thoughts have no connection to each other, so there is no way to 'defeat' the first thought with the second. Perhaps a more accurate way to describe impermanence is that both these thoughts simultaneously exist and disappear as soon as they arise. So the past and present don't actually interact, contrary to other notions of impermanence which emphasize 'continuity in the midst of change'.

Cook. Francis (1977) ..The Jewel Net of Indra. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State Press.