Essay 8

Essay 8: Everything Changes or Does It

We seem to be in a period of change. Is that true? Is it ever true? Is it always true? Well, it depends on how you look at it. I thought I would provide some ideas about change that might help to put this into perspective.

First if you feel that you are having to deal with too much change, ask yourself - which is worse, too much sameness or too much change? I think you would agree that both extremes are undesirable, and you need some change and some sameness. If your problem is too much sameness, you need to look for ways to introduce change. If your problem is too much change you need to find ways to anchor yourself in the sameness.

The Buddha argues that impermanence is the essence of life. And if you think about the vastness of time, you realize that nothing lasts forever. The universe is about 15 billion years old. The earth is about 4 ½ billion years old. There was a single continent 250 million years ago and about 200 million years ago, it broke up to eventually form the continents we have today. If we map the age of the earth into a single day, humans didn’t show up until 2 minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve. Considering these vast amounts of time, the three-year romance you had that just broke up isn’t that significant in the scheme of things. Still, if you just lost your job as well as your significant other and wrecked your car as well, it is hard to think in terms of the vastness of time involved in continental drift. So, let’s come at this from another perspective.

Back in Ancient Greece, even before Socrates, the question of whether reality was stable or in a constant state of flux was a topic of philosophical inquiry. Heraclitus believed that reality was in a constant state of flux and gave us the famous line “you cannot step in the same river twice”. There is something to this. The water is constantly flowing. The sediments are shifting. The fish come and go. So, everything is constantly changing. You can test this yourself. Toss a ball into a river and then come back the next day to see if it is still there. You can apply this to nearly everything. Can you sit under the same tree twice? Are you the same person you were yesterday?

Parmenides, another Presocratic, disputed this. He claimed that even if things aren’t exactly the same, they are same enough. And if we don’t allow for this, the acquisition of knowledge is not possible. This perspective might be a little more useful than the Buddha’s for thinking about daily life.

Change seems to be the rule and over time everything changes. But, in the short run, there is sameness, and sameness allows us to understand things, acquire knowledge, and predict things. So that is useful even if it isn’t 100% true. You aren’t really the same person that you were yesterday, but you can ignore the difference unless some massive life changing event occurred between yesterday and today.

So, when the sameness it getting to you, do something different. Introduce some change. When the change is getting to you, focus on the stability of the sameness. The question is not whether reality is stable or in a state of flux. Both are occurring at the same time. And you can choose the perspective from which to see this (i.e., focus on the sameness or the change) depending on which perspective you need.

This essay is just short of 700 words. And the recording is about 5 minutes long.

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