Welcome to the Friday Loose Bloggers Consortium where Anu, Ashok, Conrad, Delirious, gaelikaa, Grannymar, Magpie11, Padmum and I write on the same topic. Please do visit the linked blogs to get nine different flavours of the same topic. Today’s topic has been chosen by gaelikaa.
Stability is a myth. An impossible goal to achieve. Nothing in creation is stable. Impermanence is the only truth. Ask the goats that Indian Muslims buy, feed and groom for a couple of months and on Bakhrid day, slaughter. Or the turkey that is fed for months before Thanksgiving and slaughtered on that day. Everyday, the goat and the turkey enjoy total bliss and have no doubts that the next day will be exactly the same till that fateful day. Like the husband walking in one day and asking his wife for a divorce who has been very content till that day in her marital bliss.
For us human beings, the most difficult thing to accept is that truth. We go through a life time looking for it without understanding that “To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.” ~ Henri Bergson
Some semblance of stability, not complete, is possible for human beings under only one condition. I would call it dynamic equilibrium rather than stability, and that is,
“Only subsistence societies are stable, because their living conditions are equal for all.”
~Confucius.
If one strives for stability, one will not succeed, but human beings keep trying due to ignorance of the fundamental truth that stability is an impossibility. The nearest situation to stability that I can think of is that of the barnacle. “The barnacle is confronted with an existential decision about where it is going to live. Once it decides, it spends the rest of its life with its head cemented to a rock of its choice.” Human beings can decide either to be a barnacle or unstable. I flatter myself that I am unstable.