Yesterday I learned, courtesy of the new David Attenborough series “Seven Worlds, One Planet”, that India used to be an island, and that the Himalayas were formed when it slow-motion-crashed into the rest of Asia. That India is still moving northward, and that the Himalayas are still growing.

I find this a curiously hopeful thought. It makes the things I despair at in the world feel less intractable, my sense of who I am and who I could be less solid.

In Buddhism we are taught to meditate on the reality of impermanence and death. We are told that though this may seem depressing, in fact it is hugely liberating. And there’s something about this image of the Himalayas in flow that helps me glimpse the truth of that.

In Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Le Petit Prince, the little prince meets a geographer and tries to tell him about his planet. The geographer dismisses his talk of the rose he loves, saying that she is “ephemeral”. He only records things that are “eternal”, he says. Things like mountains.

But nothing is eternal. Everything is in a constant process of change, of formation and disintegration. For those of us committed to social transformation, this thought is indeed liberating.

It may be impossible to move mountains, but the mountains are already moving by themselves. The ground beneath our feet may seem like the definition of solidity, but the tectonic plates are shifting in ways that crumple it like paper. Slowly, imperceptibly – yet this process of change is powerful enough to have created those mountains in the first place. It is powerful enough to have built Mount Everest.

I no longer find it, in the famous phrase, “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. I believe that capitalism will end. That is simply an inevitability. Everything ends.

Indeed, perhaps the process of its ending has already begun. Perhaps that is part of what it means to say, as so many of us have glibly taken to doing, that we are “living in the end times”. The question is what will take its place. And that is something we can all play our part in shaping.