Everything Flows • a Prelude to Change

You could not step twice into the same river.

-Plato, paraphrasing Heraclitus

Change, we are told, is inevitable.  Along with death and taxes.  Nothing stands still.  Wind and rain wear down even the densest stone, until only sand remains.  It seems that the best we can do is bear these changes with grace, with a kind of zen passivity.  The world flows around us, and we must allow it to do so, and try to get on as best we can.

This interpretation ignores the obvious - we are intrinsically a part of the world, and so we are also constantly changing as well.  The world does its best to weather us while we weather it.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a bit of an argument with itself regarding Plato's (mis-) quotation.  They delve a bit deeper than I care to go, when it comes to translating Heraclitus' original text.  I quite like their interpretation, however.

If this interpretation is right, the message of the one river fragment... is not that all things are changing so that we cannot encounter them twice, but something much more subtle and profound. It is that some things stay the same only by changing.

Change, then, is not a force that wears us down from the outside.  Rather, it is at the core of our nature.  We are ourselves, because we ourselves are change.

The Point of the Post

All of this is just a long-winded way of telling you that I'm fiddling with the blog again today - and the overall design of the website soon.  Yes, again.

Today's big change - if I can manage not to screw it up - is both tiny and huge.  I'm changing the name.  It's been "PaperCuts" for a very long time.  Since the very first post, but both life and my artwork have evolved, so the title shall as well.

I'll write more about it someday soon.

As for today, please drop me a line via email, Twitter, FB, whatever, if I break the blog and you can't access it.  Thanks! -PG