Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 9.19

All things are changing: and you yourself are in continuous mutation and in a manner in continuous destruction, and the whole Universe too.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 9.19 (tr Long)

There are times when I feel like I am hearing the same lesson once to often, though I should hardly be frustrated if I admire its truth, and maybe I am stubbornly uncomfortable with the repetition because I have not yet retained it rightly. Marcus Aurelius on the power of change is precisely one of these lessons.

I can understand that everything is subject to change, and that I should resist the temptation to keep everything the same. Yet perhaps I am not applying this insight deeply enough.

I may still be thinking that the default position for anything is to be at rest, and that activity and motion are then somehow added to this static state. It is as if I were first imagining myself sitting there frozen in time, and only later engaged in this or that exercise, like a writer giving life to his character, or an artist animating a cartoon. In other words, though I know I am changing, I impose that change over something that I perceive first as stationary and constant.

I know, that makes your head hurt a bit, but bear with me. I mean that I am not first a man, who changes after that fact, but that my being a man can only be expressed through actions, and cannot exist independently from always being transformed. Nothing is ever fixed at one moment, but is part of a process, necessarily in flux.

To have it any other way would be like trying to stop time itself. I may think of a snapshot, of a photograph, for example, as something that captures a moment forever, yet it too is changing, as is anyone and everything around it.

I learned that once when I opened up my passport after a few years, and then saw that the picture had almost completely faded, or at another time when I looked into a dusty box of drawings I had made as a child, only to find that the paper had become yellow and brittle.

Even my memories, which I think of as being so immovable, will be altered by my experience and perspective. Existence does not stutter along in stops and starts, in a sequence of isolated frames. It passes in a continuous flow.

I am not a creature who changes, but, in a sense, a creature who is change; this is not a further quality, but within my essence itself. There is no “me” without it.

This is why generation and destruction, coming to be and passing away, are not to be feared as something strange or threatening. They are part of my very nature, within the whole of Nature. I should never fear them, but gladly embrace them.

Written in 10/2008

IMAGE: M.C. Escher, Metamorphosis II (1940)