Humans seem to like to think in terms of static, unchanging situations. That’s too bad, because in nature (which certainly includes everything humans do and build) nothing is static. Everything is always in flux, moving through a lifecycle from birth to maturity to death. Stars, human institutions, relationships, living creatures, empires, galaxies, religions, planets, philosophies -- they all have births, they all grow to maturity, age, and eventually die away. None of them is ever static – all are always changing, maturing, aging, whether their lifecycle is measures in microseconds, millennia, or billions of years.
When we humans succumb to the temptation to see things as static and unchanging, we blind ourselves to the most important aspects of what is going on around us. It’s like trying to understand a two hour movie from a single random frame of the picture. To really understand anything around us, we have to understand the movement of events – what they are coming from and what they are evolving toward. We have to try to discern the whole lifecycle, rather than the single moment we happen to be seeing.
Most people find it easier, and certainly more comfortable, to think of the world around them as essentially unchanging. But it isn’t, and those who blind themselves to the dynamic nature of events miss most of what is really happening.
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