Only the fairy tale equates changelessness with happiness...Permanence means paralysis and death. Only, in movement, with all its pain, is life.
Interpretation
True happiness is found not in stagnation but in the constant movement and change of life.
This quote emphasizes that happiness should not be associated with a state of unchanging permanence, as such a state leads to stagnation and a lack of growth. Instead, it highlights that life, though often painful and full of challenges, is dynamic and that true fulfillment comes from embracing change and movement rather than seeking an impossible state of changelessness.
In practice
In a motivational speech about embracing lifeβs challenges.
The seventeenth century is everywhere a time in which the state's power over everything individual increases, whether that power be in absolutist hands or may be considered the result of a contract, etc. People begin to dispute the sacred right of the individual ruler or authority without being aware that at the same time they are playing into the hands of a colossal state power.
Why should anyone be afraid of change? What can take place without it? What can be more pleasing or more suitable to universal nature? Can you take your bath without the firewood undergoing a change? Can you eat without the food undergoing a change? And can anything useful be done without change? Don't you see that for you to change is just the same, and is equally necessary for universal nature?
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealized past.
Unless we share with each other we gotta start makin' changes
There came a time when you realized that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.
I remember clearly, when I was about 4, my Aunt Linda said, 'I'm not babysitting him no more. He's bad.' It was one of the first conscious shifts I remember making. I decided, 'I'm going to be good now.'
I believe at the heart of any revolution for social justice and human dignity are consent and agency, the unequivocal belief that I own my body - not the state, not the church/mosque/temple, not the street and not the family.
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