~ I am not all I wish to be; nor all that I have been. ~
We are variations on a theme.
Locked in step with humanity and history in so many of our actions that at times it seems as if we are just one more iteration in an endless parade of inevitable outcomes. A theme that predates all we know and precedes us into the future further then all we can imagine. A theme that defines and combines us in our most abject of essences. We fall as all have fallen, we fail as all have failed, we war as every generation has, we lie as every people will, we hate as every race has hated, we destroy as every culture does. We are bound to this theme, so universal, so exact in its standards and stagnations, that it’s hard to believe that existence could hold any purpose other than to live and die and do no more than any else has ever done.
Yet we do.
We believe, not just because we can or must, but because we should. We are variations on a theme,
variations,
and in that variance is all the meaning in the world.
What must be realized in the considering of variance, of change, is that everything does. Every instant, every action, every iota, all that can be known can only be known because it can change, because it is changing.
Still, it is incredibly easy and increasingly comfortable to be lulled into the sense that things not only can be, but must be static. One of my favorite sets of sentences comes from “Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There”
~
“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
~
Within those lines lies a masterful metaphor. The reality that in many things you must move as fast as you can just to keep from moving, has placed many in a state where everything seems stationary. We forget the number of heartbeats needed just to keep us standing, we take for granted that we breathe. We eat as if consumption is a foregone conclusion instead of an alchemy that underlies our continual resurrection. Change is constant, so constant that sometimes we forget that there is any change at all.
We get bowed down by the boundless sameness of it all, the incessant repetition, caught up in an irrational consideration of futility, so focused on the interminable theme of mankind’s madness that we miss the majesty of each mistake. The potential inherent in failure. The fact that every fall could be the same and every rise would still be different.
All things change but not all change is equal. Change is not uniform in its origin or its effect. It varies with every action and the greatest of all is of the self.
The change of self, that conscious reworking of identity, of purpose, of worth. Is a change not of chaos and entropy but of order and action.
Things are as they are for a reason. Buildings don’t just stand. Words don’t just stay written. Hope doesn’t just happen. There must be will, there must be need, there must be motivation. To do anything you must have a greater need to do it than to leave it undone. Nothing exists in a vacuum, there is no blank slate, no instant free of influence. You are as full of change, as affected by all, as you have ever been or will ever be. You can not add change, you cannot rid yourself of all change and start anew; you have been old from the moment you began. All that can be done is to trade change for change. To change change itself. If there is something you wish to become then there is something you first must cease to be. We exist strung between all that pushes us forward and all that forces us back. Between every choice we’ve made, will make, and are making. Anything gained must mean something lost.
Time itself is bound by this, the past and the future are just present memory and imagination. The Present is all the Past that has ever been and all the Future will ever be. Time is just a term for the measuring of the transforming of everything.
As for the ease or the effort of such change. What can be said but that it is war, and in the end that change which is supported, defended, bolstered, whatever the reason why, will win. It can be no other way. But it does not have to be alone. In fact if you truly want to win, it can’t be. There are worlds of wonder in individual variation, but there are only worlds at all in theme. For all that variation is good, theme is essential. Variation makes us what we are, gives us our worth, our meaning, our purpose. Yet it is only through theme that there are any variations at all. Theme alone is a stagnant system, repeating endlessly in a self consuming cycle. Yet, variation of itself does not exist. In just the one there is nothing new in just the other nothing at all. It is only in the fusing of the both, a merging of the essence of their ideas that we find the True. Not mindless theme, or evanescent variation. But us in all our misfit glory, madness, and majesty.
Not all the same memory,
or all a different dream,
just tried, and true, and tested,
variations on a theme.