The most reassuring thing about life is that we can change, that things can change, that they always change. The strangest thing is that despite living in a universe that is one exchange of energy and matter, despite living in bodies and minds whose cells and ideas are constantly being changed, we strongly resist change, we are too afraid to disturb the structure of our lives – even if it does not help us. “People long to be resolved,” wrote Emerson, “[but] only when they are strong is there hope for them.” In another age, a prophet sanctified the premise: “Everything you touch changes,” writes Octavia Butler. “Everything that changes changes. The only constant truth is change. God changes.”
If suffering is the extent of our resistance to truth, and if change is the basic characteristic of truth, then our resistance to change is our self-directed tool of suffering.
Halfway through her life before her beautiful meditation on menopause as a microcosm of the human animal's aversion to change, Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) provided the perfect rebuttal to the infidelity at the heart of our resistance to change — our tendency to tolerate error and compromise error satisfaction — in a passage from her 1971 novel. The Lathe of Heaven (public library).
Speaking to the part that lives in all of us – the “self-cancelling, self-centered personality” that leads us to “look at things defensively” – one character encourages another:
Why are you so afraid … to change things? Try to separate yourself and try to see your point of view from the outside, properly. You are afraid of losing your balance. But change doesn't need moderation; Life is not static, after all. It's a process. There is no catch. Intellectually you know that, but emotionally you reject it. Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you cannot enter the same river twice. Life — evolution — the whole environment of space/time, matter/energy — existence itself — is actually changing… When things stop changing, that's the end result of entropy, the heat-death of the universe. More things keep moving, interrelating, colliding, changing, less balance – and more life.
Realizing that life itself, like love, is “a great gamble against the odds,” he insists that, just as we must love anyway, we must live anyway:
You can't try to live safely, there is no such thing as safety. Stick your neck out of your shell, and live life to the fullest.
Fill up on Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living, Terry Tempest Williams on the mystery of change, and Nathaniel Hawthorne on how not to waste your life, then revisit Le Guin on suffering and getting to the other side of pain.
