The Only Constant is Change
This phrase was repeated endlessly by my late teacher Arthur, though it in fact originates from the godfather of bad ideas, Karl Marx. Yet even a broken clock can be right twice a day. Change is the only thing you can rely upon. Whatever something is TODAY, you can guarantee that it will not be the same TOMORROW.
However, change is not the same as progress. In fact, many changes are backward steps, delivering a deterioration or worsening of circumstances. Yet, because the only constant is change these regressions are inevitable, and sometimes can be seen as steps backward IN ORDER TO GO FORWARD. This applies to our own individual lives, as well as those of societies and civilisations.
Many people are happy to muddy the water between change and progress, describing as progress change which suits them (caring not whether it suits anyone else). This is particularly prevalent in politics, where progressive parties advocate policies which appeal only to their base under the guise of wanting progress for everyone. More conservatively inclined parties are then accused of standing in the way of progress when really they are only fighting against change which will harm them. Whenever politicians and activists speak about the need for progress all they are really doing is softening you up for their preferred kind of change. Scientists and tech evangelists are also skilled at presenting change which suits them as progress for all. We ought to be wary of the word progress, and be much more ready to see how the advancement of progress is often little more than the victory march of one, particular, narrow power agenda.
Some people say that all change is progress, but if you think that then you will have to call the Communist Revolution of 1917, after which a hundred million people died, progress, or say that the rise of Hitler, after which fifty million died, was progress. And this would be tough going. Such events were momentous changes alright, but they were not progress, merely the advancement of one group at the expense of others.
Yet for all this, the only constant is change, and this is reflected in the Tarot card The Wheel of Fortune, which shows what some used to call The Worlds Mill, or Fortuna, the inevitable ups and downs of life. Civilisations prosper and expand, before rotting from within and collapsing. This is the nature of life on the material plane, and there is nothing that anyone can do about it, because the only constant is change.
Every life must therefore experience a mixture of victory and defeat, success and failure, and there is no way around this. The fact that millions are made on the back of convincing us that we can always win, need not age and should not die, is irrelevant. We do fail, we do age and we will die. After which we will be reborn, into a different body, time and place. All because the only constant is change.
Because the only constant is change, all winners eventually lose, and all losers eventually get to win. The only way to prevent this, to shield people from the pain of losing would be to also take away the joy of winning. To abolish losing you would have to abolish winning. Yet, because the only constant is change this will never be possible. Winners and losers will always be with us, and over the course of lifetimes you will be one, and then the other.
The only way out of this win-lose, up-down cycle is to detach from the game. I do not mean to stop engaging with life, but to stop taking it all so seriously, to see victory and failure from a different perspective, that they only exist in order to teach us something. This mind-shift allows us to see that winners, in truth, are often not winners at all. Winners are simply those who have learned how to succeed within the narrow rules of a particular game, and so long as they stay within that game they can, if they are lucky, stay winners. But inevitably they will leave the field, to operate within someone else’s rules. And that is the point at which they lose and are swiftly reminded of one of the immutable facts of life, that the only constant is change.
