A change is gonna come...

whether I like it or not.

Everything changes all the time….

Gary called me up. He’s the guy who is going to pick up my daughter’s car, which is sitting in my driveway. She is donating the car, or the profits from the car, to a local nonprofit organization through a service that does this.

Gary’s truck broke down and he can’t come for a few more days. No problem. I don’t think there is any significant snow forecast before he comes.

We got into a deep philosophical conversation very quickly. It went sort of like this: might be warm, roads might be muddy, weirdly warm for this time of year, freak out re climate change, but I like it when it’s warm, yeh, me too, and even though the climate changing is scary, doesn’t everything change all the time? Isn’t that reality, that everything changes all the time? And then Gary said, “I’d love it if everything stayed exactly the same.”

And I said, “No, Gary, you would hate it.”

Gary would hate it, and so would I, and so would you. I can’t even imagine it, and I have a pretty good imagination. Because immediately it becomes a 'still life,' a picture without life. Without motion, without action—a sculpture. Even if you try to decipher the particular things you want to stay the same, like your age, or your children’s age, or the way someone feels about you, or your bank account, it just won’t work. If the natural processes aren’t working, nothing is working.

Bvelevski, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I understand how Gary feels. When fight, flight, or freeze is on the menu, I always choose freeze. There are, no doubt, some circumstances in which freeze is a good strategic move, but most of the time it’s not.

It’s a dream that holding still will keep me safe. That maybe I will be invisible. Holding still is not an invisibility cloak; it’s stasis. And for us, for living creatures, for everything that lives in a physical form, stasis is not our natural state. Our natural state is movement, change, coming and going, breathing in and breathing out. Continuous birth and death. Even the Big Death is movement.

The inevitability of death is something I still have a very hard time comprehending, even though I know it is as natural as the breeze.

What I can’t understand is how someone I knew, and loved, who was their very own irreplaceable self, could disappear. Especially these days, when I can hear and see people I love even when they are oceans and continents away.

Death is where the desire for things to stay the same (pre-death) really kicks in. The only way I can sort of accept death is seeing it not as a hard edge or end but as part of a bigger picture that encompasses death as movement—as life, in fact. Holding still and seeing a big picture; those are two of my coping techniques. Both have their pros and cons.

I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want, and that is to dance. I want to dance through the rest of my life here on earth, because when I am dancing I am not holding still. I am hearing music and I am responding to it joyfully with my whole body in the exact present. Constant and continuous change is the name of the dancing game and the life game.

As Bob Dylan says, “you better start swimmin' (dancing) or you’ll sink like a stone, for the times they are a-changin'.” The times are always changing. That’s the definition of time: what always changes.

Or as they say in New England, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.”

A cartoon about change

I made this cartoon a long time ago, and I still like it.