Winds of Change

A couple of days ago, I spent a good half-hour scrolling through the photos on my phone, which basically tell my life story back to the time I graduated college. While scrolling, I came across this photo of my very first apartment in Jacksonville, FL. I love this photo. To me, it represents the very best of times: quiet evenings sipping tea and reading Lord of the Rings by candlelight, dreaming about the future, and listening to the rain fall on the canopies of the trees outside. Those evenings were pretty close to perfect. But it would be disingenuous of me to leave it there.

The Best and Worst of Times

The best of times, you see, were always juxtaposed with the worst of times. The more unhappy I was at work, the happier I was to be home. As I adjusted and work became less stressful (at least sometimes), the happiness also seemed milder in response. It seems that in order to have joy, at least in this life, I must have struggle.

This goes along with another contradiction I’ve noticed many times before in my life – that in order to feel at peace, I must always be doing something. I must always be moving toward some sort of goal; even sitting here in quarantine, I’m trying to do seven different things – including writing these blogs. At least once a day, I decide I’m going to take a break and just sit. So I do – for about five minutes. Then I go back to whatever I was doing. I am only ‘at rest’ when I’m in motion.

As I thought about this, I realized this was a pattern we see everywhere in life. Even the earth under us feels still even while it is spinning incredibly fast. And if we zoom in, we see the pattern again and again.

Motion and Life

When we describe a room where the air hasn’t moved for a long time, we don’t describe the atmosphere as “calm,” or “orderly.” We describe it as “stuffy” or even “stifling.” When there is no wind, no breeze, the air grows stale. The cobwebs build. If we are outside on a sunny day without breeze, the sweat and heat can become unbearable. In a room where nothing moves, things just sit and grow dirtier and dirtier. Motion is intertwined with life.

Or consider water. Anyone who’s lived near swampland probably thinks the same thing I do when I see stagnant water: mosquitoes. When water grows stagnant, vermin and disease breed. You don’t drink stagnant water; you drink what in Hebrew or Aramaic is called “living water” – that is, moving water, water from a spring, or a stream, or a river. Motion is intertwined with life.

We all love looking at pictures of idyllic landscapes, picture-perfect streams and meadows, mountain valleys and forest glades that never have to change. But it wouldn’t work in real life. Decay and corruption are always at work in real life; we need change and temporality, wind and waves, to disrupt them and renew freshness, vitality, and life, to cleanse us.

Keeping things the same

In our homes we climate control, and it seems like we’re keeping everything the same. But of course, what we’re really doing is constantly putting out energy (in the form of electric bills) to fight to keep things the way they are by recirculating air and altering its temperature. It is controlled motion; it is constant change giving an impression of changelessness.

Of course, you can have too much; there’s a reason “barren” and “windswept” often go together when describing landscapes. Deserts are often very windy places. But that makes it no less necessary to have some wind. Motion is intertwined with life.

I’m reminded of this whenever I have to, once again, pack everything up and move, either across the country or across the world. Since leaving home, I’ve never lived in one place for more than two years. It wears on you sometimes. Humans don’t like change; when something is good, we say we want it to last forever, or to stay in this moment forever. We wish we could stay children forever, or young and in love forever, or in our current apartment and job forever. But that’s just not how things work.

A new beginning

Even if we could stay there, it wouldn’t be good for us. Our souls would begin to decay; diseases would begin to fester. We would begin to grow static, to plateau, without the fresh winds of change and challenge to touch us. Just as our minds grow static and small without new, challenging, conflicting ideas to renew them, so our lives grow small if we don’t have change to stir them up, to shake away the layers of crud that we gather around us and allow what truly matters to shine forth. It is a cleansing, a catharsis, when done in the right way. We must let it sweep away the old so that the new may come, because however beautiful the old is, it will not remain beautiful if we insist on holding on to it.

However rich and ripe the fruit is now, it will not continue to be so unless you eat it. We’ll lose it in any case – either by rotting or by use. Its life and goodness can either be lost or transmitted. So let us not be shy about taking the goodness from life and using it; we cannot cling onto it forever. Let us enjoy it fully, and mourn it fully when it is gone, and turn to embrace the new goodness that comes. Let us not live lives of fear, constantly fixated on what we might lose. Let us look for new horizons, new opportunities, and ever with a frolic welcome take the thunder and the sunshine as we seek a newer world.