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Permanence is an illusion
Monday, 21 August 2006
When I was growing up, my life went through a lot of changes. I started off living in Canberra and going to school there. It was a comfortable life in a nice quiet neighborhood.
Then, when I was seven years old, my parents divorced. My brother and I were taken out of our school and moved with our mother to live in Alice Springs, a small community out in the Australian desert. A lot of aboriginal kids went to the school I was sent to there, and I was picked on a bit because I was a middle-class white-kid. It took me a couple of years to learn to fit in, but soon I was able to get on well with all the tough desert kids.
When I was twelve, my mother moved to Darwin in Australia's tropical north. Once again I had to change school and make a whole lot of new friends. The culture among the kids was different once again, but Darwin's a nice place and I soon learned to fit in.
Three years later we moved back down to Canberra and I ended up going to quite a tough school. I was coming in at the end of the year and my relaxed Darwin ways didn't gel too well with the street-smart Canberra types. Once again I had to adapt.
Changing towns every few years and having to make new friends is a difficult scene for anyone when they're growing up. But it has its advantages too. It taught me to adapt quickly, and the valuable lesson that life is a constant road of change and surprise.
A lot of people don't want to learn this lesson. Because today is usually a lot like yesterday, they start to believe things will always be as they are. Conservative columnist Mark Steyn once summed it up nicely when he said "Permanence is the illusion of every age".
We look around us and everything seems so solid and set that we forget how much things mutate over the years. No doubt those who lived under the British or Roman Empires thought they would last forever. The USSR, which hung like a shadow over the world for half a century and challenged the USA for global dominance, vanished from the face of the earth in only a few years.
America is the preeminent power today, and we all just assume it will stay like that forever. But history hasn't been kind to the big powers of the past.
Take a look at the list of the biggest companies in America in 1896 compared to today, for another example.. Of the original Dow Jones list of companies, only one still exists - General Electric. U.S. Leather, Tennessee Coal and The Chicago Gas Company were the IBMs, Wal-Marts and Exxons of their day.
Most of the big powerful companies of today will almost certainly fade and die over the coming decades. Wang or Osborne computers anybody?
Or look at the celebrities from twenty years ago. Where's Rick Astley, Burt Reynolds and Duran Duran today. To think these people were once titans of the entertainment industry is laughable.
The worries of the world also change year to year. In the late 1990s, big business was terrified they would be destroyed by the internet. Technology was the most important industry. Today, oil and commodities are the hot sectors. Five years ago, everyone thought a low oil price would stay forever, today everyone thinks expensive oil is here to stay.
If you're a child, it's hard to imagine ever becoming a middle-aged adult. If you're a middle-aged adult, it's hard to imagine ever getting old. Yet, unless we have some kind of accident, these things will certainly happen.
People fall in and out of love. They die. They get fired from their jobs and find new ones. Some get richer, some get poorer, then richer again. A parent is lost but a child is born.
Everything changes and you should really expect this to happen. Rather than fighting it, try to surf the wave of the transient.
For some people the idea of change is scary, and it's true that sometimes it can be negative. We can end up losing those things that make us happy and comfortable.
But change also carries the seed of opportunity. When I was twenty-three and my girlfriend dumped me, I thought my life was over. Two years later I met my wife which probably never would have happened if I'd still been with the other girl.
Things are bound to change. Just accept it and try to flow with it as much as possible. Rather than focussing on what you've lost during the journey, try to look for the positive in what you might find.
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