Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7.18

Is any man afraid of change? Why, what can take place without change? What then is more pleasing or more suitable to the Universal Nature?

And can you take a bath, unless the wood undergoes a change? And can you be nourished, unless the food undergoes a change? And can anything else that is useful be accomplished without change?

Do you not see then that for yourself also to change is just the same, and equally necessary for the Universal Nature?

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 7 (tr Long)

My own dislike of change probably has less to do with my fear of what is new than my attachment to what is old, and such a sense of nostalgia seems to be rooted in a desire for something stable. What I am forgetting, of course, is that change is itself a type of stability, because it is always ordered toward becoming good, and directed at the progress of improvement. Life may not be stable in its conditions, but it can well be stable in the way we aim for the mark.

The Universe itself is always in action, and such action is always in the form of moving from one state to another. What is left behind is not lost, but is transformed into something new, and in this sense we might say that what is good is always striving to become better.

Nor does such a process ever entirely have a termination, since change will express itself in the form of cycles, where the end of one thing continues into the beginning of another. The better found in an ending is the very fact that it will have a new beginning.

As a child I was fascinated by the life cycles of a frog or of a butterfly, and I recall being taught that each of these occurred in four stages, from egg to tadpole or larva, to froglet or pupa, to frog or butterfly. Each stage had its own distinct characteristics, and served its own distinct purpose within the whole.

I drew out an example of each kind of cycle for myself, and I realized I couldn’t just represent it as a line. It had to be a circle. The frog and the butterfly were not in and of themselves the final, or even the best, stage, because they in turn existed to produce new eggs. Was human life all that different?

When I look outside at all the changes that make me feel nervous or apprehensive, I might be best served by trying to transform that uncertainty into hope. Even more importantly, I should surely think the same thing when I look inside at myself. I am hardly doing any good at all by expecting to sit by idly, like a bump on a log.

No, the log came from a tree, that came from a sapling, that came from a seed. The log may become part of a house, and a man may live in it, and he may plant a new seed, and from it may grow a new tree. That’s not frightening at all. It is beautiful. 

Written in 10/2007