Strip, strip, strip for Jesus!

Change is an inevitable part of life, an inescapable facet of existence, but it seems that many people are not naturally equipped to deal with it. That change is a constant process and stability a construction is obvious when you stop to consider it, but the myth of constancy, the impossibility of permanence is something that the average human fights against.

We define ourselves by the consistency of things; our reflection in the mirror, our names, our jobs, our lovers. However, it only takes a moment’s reflection to realise that all the things we consider as constant and fixed are constantly in a state of change, everything is in motion in some way. I don’t look the same each time I look in the mirror, something will be different, but as long as the changes fall within my acceptable norms I will consider my face to look the same.

All of which is no surprise, this is not news. But why can change be so painful? If we know at some level that nothing will ever stay the same, why does it come as a surprise when it just does what we knew it would all along? On the one hand we need to define certain fixed points in order for us to function. Friends and family are two examples. We believe that our friends and our families will behave within certain parameters. The fact that we place so much value in the actions of friends and family betrays our deep desire for consistency within our fellow humans; maybe we see in them a reflection of our own existence and they act as a guarantee that things are the way the seem. But placing these sorts of prohibitions on fallible humanity seems foolish when we know that this consistency is illusory.

This all sounds far more hippyish than I intended it to. I wanted to cheer someone up because their life is going through a few changes at the moment. I wanted to say that this is how things should be. I would not want to start stating where happiness resides, but unhappiness can be found in change, which seems like the wrong place for it to be, because change is all that we really have. Or, more likely, unhappiness can be found in the confounded expectations encouraged by our indoctrination into the cult of permanence that is foisted on each one of us from the beginning of our lives. Things may stay the same, gravity, π, the speed of light, the sum of the interior angles of a triangle, but people will always change. It is sad that one of the only certain things that we can rely on, that we will always change and be different, should be such a source of pain.