Change is intrinsic to all phenomena. And once we recognize this, we must accept that none of the verities that we wish were forever perfect and true could be: nothing exists unchanging forever. Not even our notion of nothingness remains unscathed by the passage of time. However much we may want to believe that what is real and true and good is real and true and good forever, we can only embrace such a delusion by embracing a form of intellectual infantilism, painting a fixed and unchanging canvass over a tableau of unceasing flux. But we cannot live in comfort if we perceive the world as it is. So we avoid asking "deep" questions, we do not long attend to beginnings and endings, we say things like "we will never forget" and refuse to ask what comes after there is no longer a "we."
I embrace this notion not out of love or affection but out of scientific acceptance: the standard model of modern physics compels us to conceive of change as inherent in all phenomena. This is relevant because all of the electronic devices exists only because the standard model taught us how to make them. Electronics implies the standard model and the standard model requires that change is intrinsic: change exists in everything from fundamental particles to the universe entire. Change is not excluded from any region of spacetime nor from any aspect or description of it. And while others may find it justifiable to postulate entities that exist in some manner other than physically, I do not.
The cell phone we carry around compels us, via the philosophical mouthful ontological commitment, to accept that change is intrinsic to all phenomena. Even to our thoughts. Even to number and ideas. Even to fantasies, Change applies to the smallest and most ephemeral entitles (such as electrons and tau leptons) to the largest and most persistent (such as galaxy clusters and the universe itself) . While we often have an emotional need to imagine that something is fixed for all time, we should not allow such an affect to hide this universal feature from us. Everything flows and nothing abides.
While our individual mortality may be, just barely, possible to bear, it is far more difficult to accept that humanity as a whole has not always existed and will, in all probability, eventually cease to exist.
When I hear the phrase "there will always be…" followed by some human relevant phenomena (e.g., war, poverty, stupidity, etc.) I find it difficult not to see those mouthing that phrase as children, intellectually speaking. For accepting one's own mortality is something that usually comes late in adulthood (if it does), and a persistent unwillingness to accept the universality of change seems to be little more than another level of immaturity, one that persists in many of those even after they have accepted their own impermanence.
We can choose to remain as children throughout our entire lives or embrace the impermanence of all things, even everything. Nothing is fixed, not even the notion of fixity. Nothing is infinite, not even the notion of infinity. Nothing is forever, not even the notion of eternity.
To be kind, I will end by providing the reader with the balm of a numbing puzzle, one that is clear, though it may seem to most to be no more lucid than a Zen koan:
Nothing is nothing, not even the notion of nothingness.
