By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

The most assuring thing about life is that we can change, that things can change, that they are always changing. The most maddening is that despite living in a universe that is one constant transmutation of energy and matter, despite living in bodies and minds whose cells and ideas are constantly being replaced, we so vehemently resist change, too afraid to unsettle the structure of our lives — even when it doesn’t serve us. “People wish to be settled,” Emerson wrote, “[but] only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” In another epoch, another prophet consecrated the elemental: “All that you touch you change,” wrote Octavia Butler. “All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.”

If suffering is the magnitude of our resistance to reality, and if change is the fundamental constant of reality, then our resistance to change is our self-directed instrument of suffering.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Half a lifetime before her brilliant meditation on menopause as a microcosm of the human animal’s hostility to change, Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) offered a perfect refutation of the central fallacy at the heart of our resistance to change — our tendency to mistake stasis for equilibrium and to mistake the complacency of equilibrium for contentment — in a passage from her 1971 novel The Lathe Of Heaven (public library).

Speaking to a part that lives in all of us — the “self-cancelling, centerpoised personality” that leads us “to look at things defensively” — one character urges another:

Why are you so afraid of yourself… of changing things? Try to detach yourself from yourself and try to see your own viewpoint from the outside, objectively. You are afraid of losing your balance. But change need not unbalance you; life’s not a static object, after all. It’s a process. There’s no holding still. Intellectually you know that, but emotionally you refuse it. Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice. Life — evolution — the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy — existence itself — is essentially change… When things don’t change any longer, that’s the end result of entropy, the heat-death of the universe. The more things go on moving, interrelating, conflicting, changing, the less balance there is — and the more life.

Observing that life itself, like love, is “a huge gamble against the odds,” he insists that, just as we must love anyway, we must live anyway:

You can’t try to live safely, there’s no such thing as safety. Stick your neck out of your shell, then, and live fully.

Complement with Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living, Terry Tempest Williams on the paradox of change, and Nathaniel Hawthorne on how not to waste your life, then revisit Le Guin on suffering and getting to the other side of pain.