Change

"At the heart of our Western culture lies a contradiction, one that we seem unwilling to confront, and might just be the source of much of our unhappiness. I'm referring to our concept of perfectionWe uphold an ideal of perfection that is unchanging and eternal, even as all around us we experience nothing but change. 

Change defines every moment of our existence, yet we resist it. We fight aging, we try to hide the flaws in our work and in ourselves. We  imagine what success looks like in our minds and then try to reproduce it in the real world. When we achieve anything we try to lock it down and make it last as long as possible, and when they crumble—as they always do—we rebuild. Why do we persist? What drives this relentless pursuit of a permanence that never existed?

Once, two voices spoke to the ancient world. Heraclitus, who saw change as the only constant, and Plato, who believed the world who's foundation was built of on unchanging realm of perfection. This was the watershed moment, and we chose Plato, and with him, the belief that life is a shadow cast by a higher, ideal form. In doing so, we inherited a longing for the immutable and an enduring suspicion of the transient.

But what if we had listened to Heraclitus instead? Would we still fear failure and aging as betrayals of an imagined ideal? Would we still chase an ideal we're doomed to never find?  Or would we learn to enjoy the present, and find fulfillment in the process more than the final goal?

For most of my life, I’ve been chasing shadows, trying to become some distant version of myself I thought I should be. There were brief moments of joy, times when I thought, If only this could last. But nothing ever did.

Now, at 53, I find myself wondering if permanence was the wrong goal all along. Maybe happiness isn’t waiting somewhere down the road, after achievement of some perpetually receding goal. Maybe it’s right here, in the passing moments I take for granted. Maybe the challenge isn’t to try and hold on to the good ones—but to fully experience them now before they’re gone."

How did Paul die

Paul's death comes after the end of the Bible, so we can't be sure. 

One tradition says he was beheaded in Rome and the last we hear of him in the Bible is during his imprisonment in Rome. But he did have plans to eventually go to Spain and some say he was released and eventually made that missionary journey as well and died in Rome later during another imprisonment.

This would mean that his appeal to Caesar as a Roman citizen was ultimately successful. This is not unlikely especially when you consider his behavior in the Roman prison when it collapsed and during the shipwreck. Paul and his companions could have taken the opportunity to be free, but they said stayed saving the lives of their captors.

Paul's actions might have been seen not as a guilty man, but an honorable kne seeking the vindication only Caesar could offer to his reputation. 

And history is rarely as neat and tidy as we would like it to be.

 Everyone agrees that Paul was beheaded in Rome, and the  New Testament ends with Paul in Rome. It's very tempting to say that he simply died there, since we have no records beyond legend, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.