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."