Change

The Only Constant in Life Is Change.”- Heraclitus

The above quote is attributed to Heraclitus, one of the earliest philosophers, who was born about twenty-six hundred years ago. It is, in my opinion, one of the best of all quotes. It embellishes something of a paradox, but one on which we can find something of a universal truth. Change happens. The universe changes and everything within it changes.

When I think about my own life I like to see it as a series of stages. I have pictures to prove it. I am lucky enough to have pictures of me from the time I was an infant. I look nothing like I did some seventy-plus years ago, fifty years ago and forty years ago. You might have trouble believing that a picture of me taken today is similar to a picture of me taken thirty years ago or twenty years ago or even ten years ago. We change physically, mentally, emotionally and in so many other ways. From what scientific theory tells us the planet we are riding on never ever stays in the same position in space. According to one source, the Earth is moving along at about sixty-seven thousand miles-per-hour and our solar system is spinning around our galaxy at some half-a-million miles-per-hour. Change is the order and the one constant of the reality in which we find ourselves.

While I could elaborate on a thousand different types of change, this book focuses primarily on one type of change, the change in humans and even more specifically how people intentionally attempt to change certain aspects of themselves based on some ideal perception of how they want to be. The change could be a change to their appearance, health, relationships, habits, beliefs, or finances. They might want to change where they reside. They might want to change their vocation or go back to school. They might feel like they need to fall in or out of love. If you Google “what do people most want to change about themselves” you will see a list that never ends. Is there really anything that people can’t change about themselves given enough time and a strong enough reason? My belief is that people can change significantly more about themselves than those things which are simply impossible to change. Actually, the only thing I can think about on a moment’s notice is my past. However, there’s no question that, over time, my memories of that past are open to revision.

Hopefully, I’ve made a reasonably good case that you can, if your desire and your resources are up to the task, change virtually anything about yourself. Not everything, but almost. Remember, you can’t become invisible. But, would you want to? If so, why? First and foremost you are going to change no matter what you do to avoid it. Aging alone makes people somewhat unrecognizable at high school reunions, especially those classic 50 year reunions. To even begin to think that their opinions and attitudes have remained constant from the time they entered high school until their ten-year high school reunion would, in my opinion, be a mistake.

Change is also accelerating. A thousand years ago there wasn’t much change from year to year. I can remember when I wrote my first computer program. I typed it on a series of cards which I then fed into a card reader. Once read, the program ran on a mainframe computer when its turn in the queue came up and my output was sent back to the computer lab where I ran the program the next day. There were no personal computers. My first cell phone came in two parts. The first part was the box they installed in the trunk of my car which was about the size of a large VHS tape player which had all the electronics in it. The box hooked up to the receiver mounted next to the driver’s seat. I couldn’t take the phone out of the car. It was bolted in. The whole contraption must have weighed in at 30 pounds. I was so glad when the “bag phone” came out, not so much for the size reduction and portability as the fact that there were now significantly more cell towers and I no longer had to drive around as much looking for a spot with a good cell tower signal.

The world around you is going to change.
You could probably buy yourself some land and try to avoid as much of the change as possible but you’ll never be able to avoid it altogether as there is only so much self-sufficiency that humans can muster

Change is inevitable. The question you should ask yourself is how you will deal with it.