The times they are a changin'

Today I want to think about change. It has always fascinated and frustrated me that we have to work so hard to maintain our lives––from our bodies, to our homes, to our villages, to our world. It seems that we fight against the natural order––change––almost every second of our existence. I remember reading an article about steroids and a quote from a juicer: “Our muscles will never love us as much as we love them.” It’s so true. Try lifting weights for a few years and then stopping for a few weeks. Every bit of muscle toning and strengthening will quickly evaporate. But it is not just our bodies, it’s our weed infested flower beds that are overrun overnight; it is our lawns that flip-off the power mowers and constantly fight to be taller; it is the vegetation that forces its way into the cracks in the sidewalk and through the buried drain pipes. Yes, decay is inherent in all things. We know this, yet there is something in our nature that fights against it––that still goes out there and mows and paints and hits the gym and desperately strives to maintain what cannot be maintained.

OK, you can stop reading now, because yes this is nothing new. Anyone who is even slightly reflective knows all this; and others, perhaps more eloquently then I, have already said it. The first example that comes to mind is from one of my idols, who too is constantly changing, Bob Dylan. Here is a small clip from one of his most successful songs.

Come me gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimming'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'. 

Oh, but wait, maybe I found something that ain’t a-changin’: the lyrics to this song––Art. Is it possible that I love literature, music, film because once it’s released it stays the same. It is always there. I mean Dylan wrote this song in 1965 (the year I was born). Dylan is 46 years older now. He certainly has changed, but the lyrics are still here carved in stone. 

If you’ve been faithfully reading my blog (thank you), then you know that I like to quote Wikipedia. Partially I do this because I love the idea of Wikipedia and what it says about how we develop knowledge. Perhaps I’ll blog on this someday, but for now here’s what Wikipedia says about this old Greek dude named Heraclitus

Ηράκλειτος (Herakleitos; Heraclitus) of Ephesus (c.535 BC - 475 BC) was a Greek philosopher, known for his doctrine of change being central to the universe. 

So even way back in 500 BC people noticed this struggle for maintenance. Here are some sayings attributed to good ol’ Heraclitus.

Everything flows, nothing stands still.

Nothing endures but change.

The only constant is change.
 

and my personal favorite:

History is a child building a sand-castle by the sea, and that child is the whole majesty of man’s power in the world. 

Let’s end this with one other example from the humanities: Holden Caulfield from J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in The Rye. Perhaps there is no other character in literature who hates change more than this guy. He wants to stop children from growing up; he wants to stop himself from growing up; he wants the ducks to stay in the park; and he, of course, loves the museum.

"The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. . . . Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.” 

Art, and maybe even this blog, are to me what museums are to Holden. Yes, I know that someday my literal and figurative house will fall down, and I fight against it with every scrap of energy I can muster. But sometimes I need to retreat to the world of constancy and stability––to the world of Art.