History is a permanent display of foregone conclusions. Life, History, are always about change.
This morning, as I was departing Ottawa for a trip back in time to the old country, I saw the rainbow flag on top of the UOttawa building. It was flying right next to Canada’s own maple standard.
And all of a sudden, it occurred to me how fleeting standards truly are.
An image had come to mind, namely the quick pan from Charles Town, South Carolina’s Assembly in 1776, when it voted to break away from the mother country alongside the 13 colonies, to the same building a few years later, when Lord Cornwallis captured it for the Crown.
This should give us pause. Pause to reflect how transient and fragile things are. Most people don’t realize History is like a pendulum suspended on a hinge forever swinging between two points on an arc.
And like it, History never ceases to move, and we in turn go along for the ride. It is a Brownian movement as any physicist could have concocted.
But we act as if we didn’t know that. And it never ceases to amaze me how unprepared for the sudden shift in vector, people really are.
And believe it or not, everything is in flux. Everything from the vagaries of life, which throw us off from the highest perches to the lowest troughs, to what happens in between the birth and death of a human.
I guess in the great scheme of things, nothing stays the same. Although, paradoxically enough, everything revolves along the same deep lines carved into the ground by countless generations of humans. But perhaps that is the Meaning of Life: to go through the same motions our parents did in order to raise children so that they can themselves become parents and do the same thing for their children.
I guess Life is about Change as much as it is about Immanence.
Götterdämmerung 