Change

“Nature abhors a vacuum,” said someone once upon a time, and I’m inclined to think that it was someone with a cat named Nature. After cranking up the Electrolux one morning and watching Nature frantically bouncing off the walls trying to escape the swelling, roaring beast, a housewife said to her scientist husband when he came home, “Nature really abhors that vacuum,” abhor being the word of the day from the vocabulary-building lessons she was taking to self-improve and impress the other faculty wives, and she was itching to put it to use. 

Her husband, who had not married her for her intellect, turned the phrase over in his mind, liking the sound of it, determined that it in fact illustrated a fundamental scientific principle, and adopted it for his own, never giving her a bit of credit for it. He began trying it out at cocktail parties and damned if it didn’t catch on.

Of course, nature doesn’t actually “abhor” anything, that feeling being strictly limited to humans with free time and imagination enough to develop a comprehensive panoply of unnecessary emotions with which to complicate their lives, but it’s true—she will not tolerate emptiness and inactivity. 

It’s an active, swirling, burgeoning, world, and the processes of growth, decay, and regeneration that began with the first electrons spinning around a nucleus will not be denied, try though we may to stymie them in service to our own selfish desires. Try sometime to just leave something alone. Don’t clean or maintain it in any way, don’t move it or shelter it or interfere at all, and you will realize in short order that change is the foundational guiding principle of the universe. Be it an orange or a skyscraper, Nature will ultimately render it as dust and reassign that dust elsewhere. 

The organizational constructs of society are no different, the governments, economic systems, laws, traditions, mores, behavioral standards, and languages ever evolving and changing to reflect the needs and dictates of peoples and places. That is the way it is, has been, and will be, right up until such time as every atom composing every bit of matter on this planet gets redistributed out into the universe to go on to bigger and better, as yet unknown, things.

Change. It is, as popularly described, the one constant, and yet there are some— many—who either did not get cc’ed on the issue, whose dog ate the memo, or, more likely, opt for a bullheaded position and resist the great god Change in whatever form she takes, choosing instead to look back wistfully on a past that never was and disdainfully dismiss all aspects of modernity that do not conform to their notion of how things should be, i.e. the way they used to be. The good ol’ days, and it’s not just senescent old codgers bemoaning the modern world. I’ve heard thirty-somethings bitching about “kids today” and the golden age of the Internet.

The prevailing motif of these cranks is that “the world has gone to hell.” What they really mean is that the world is not exactly how they would like it to be, or the way they remember it being when they were young and everything was fresh and new. 

I hate to be the one to bust your bubble, people, but it’s not the world that’s gone to hell, it’s you. You’re decaying like a forgotten potato under the sink and transferring the disgust you feel at your own degradation and the mortality it signifies to the world at large, blaming it for your feelings of irrelevance and uselessness. People who are unable to make this distinction seize on the signifiers of the modern age as proof of the country’s hellward trajectory, whatever they may be and whatever period it is. Automated looms, the horseless carriage, desegregated schools, a Catholic president, women in the workplace, a black president, and legal marijuana all got the good-ol-dayers up in arms, and I don’t doubt that a group of aged proto-humans back in prehistory refused to sit around the fire and decried the weakness of youth for their dependence on artificial heat and light.

Today’s disgruntled oldsters tend to focus on the economy as it compares to that of the postwar era, when a (white) man could raise a family and keep his wife at home to tend to his needs on the proceeds of a salary he received from a company that rewarded his loyalty with benefits and a fat pension, but that economic model was based on a couple of important things: one, the exclusion of three-quarters of the population from the money trough— women and minorities— and b), the complete disregard of resource management and environmental responsibility. 

Call me crazy, but I like the fact that a person can now realize and monetize his or her potential without regard to their ethnicity or reproductive apparatus. Keeping enough trees around to supply enough oxygen for us to breathe and not adulterating it with pollutants may seem like a radical idea, but it’s just possible that they do more good in the ground and growing than rendered into board-feet to build gazebos.

When you’re young, and strong, and good-looking, the world is yours and you embrace it with verve and brio. What’s to stop you from doing the same in your golden years, besides your own crankiness and intransigence? Instead of sitting at home marinating in the vinegar of bitterness and regret, writing angry letters to the newspaper and stoking the fires of your discontent, participate. Have such fun as you’re still able to sustain without busting a blood vessel and understand that perception is everything. You can choose to focus on what you regard as pre-apocalyptic indicators of impending doom or you can enjoy the diverse and bountiful pleasures of life, both the naturally occurring and all the cool diversions we’ve managed to contrive to stave off existential angst. Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.