We need to get beyond thinking of the world as composed of things and accept a world in which everything is composed of processes. We need to think of change as something built into the very structure of everything—to think of the world as composed of little bits of change.
Poetically speaking, quantum physics is a description of the universe in which everything is made up of tiny little bits of change. Change is never absent from any picture, or from any system, for any interval. Change is intrinsic. Change is the stuff of life. Literally.
You live because of the continual exchange of gasses through the lungs, of the continual, complex construction of proteins, of the ongoing birth and death of cells. Life is change, life is complex fire—it cannot be frozen. It is always and forever a process.
(And then the devil's advocate on my shoulder says, "What about frozen embryos? They are frozen—are you saying that they are not alive?" And my answer is, yes, they are not alive. But I'm not interested here in debating the philosophic points of reproductive technologies.)
We live a finite number of days, some finite total of hours, minutes, seconds. Our bodies are changing, slowly, imperceptibly each second, minute, hour, day, but we only can see those changes once they happen over a longer period. We rarely stand still long enough to do time-lapse photography of human beings as we cleverly do with plants. We are not the same person tomorrow as we were yesterday.
But now we are into the philosophic issue of identity, sameness, and difference. And how we define identity determines what we will say is the same and what we will call different. In absolute terms, no two things are ever the same, but we extract particular features, measure them to some accepted tolerance, compare each to each, lockstep, and then insist that these two chairs or these two ideas are identical.
To think of the world as it is – that is to accept a Heraclitean vortex that gives rise to occasionally stable clumps of matter that we take up and form into the things we surround ourselves with. We do not see stability as the exception because we cocoon ourselves with those materials that are stable. A forest, a desert, an ocean are richly evolving places, a bit different each day. But inside a house, the only differences are the things we move around, or the accretion of dust.
Look around you, wherever you are and you will find your world cluttered with human artifacts—it's an even bet if you will be able to see anything from where you sit that is not in some way artificial. We don't see change because we choose to surround ourselves only with things that are are long lasting.
And of course that is a good thing. We build refrigerators so that our food won't change into poison before we have a chance to eat it. We build walls and roofs so our beds won't convert into sponges when it rains. We sew clothes so that we can remain warm enough to sit and write blog postings before we go to bed.
But our passion—our obsession—with permanence leaves us like flies in amber frozen in an illusion of fixity. Lives are not lived in amber, but in change-rich environments.
And this is tremendously hypocritical of me, since I have lived my life in amber for several years now. But that is the topic for a later post.
