Everything is temporary.

Despite this, humans love to think of things in a concrete manner. There is a comfort to be found in predictability, a pride in taming nature, a solace in the perpetual. We innately resist change, instead opting to place our faith in the false sanctity of the everlasting.

We do this in many ways: starting families, establishing legacies, erecting building that last for thousands of years. In these acts and more, we seek to bring order to the chaos of change, familiarity to uncertainty, and strive against the fleeting nature of mortality.

Standing still while the winds of time smash against us is how we give death the finger.

But this is one of the biggest fallacies of the human condition. It ignores the most fundamental truth of the universe: change is inevitable.

Over the course of a life, you change. You will be a baby, a child, a teenager, an adult, an old person, and, eventually, a corpse. During that transition, despite any protestations you offer, the world around you will change oblivious.

Everything is temporary. Once great empires are now buried in the sand. The very surface of the planet is in constant flux. Humanity will live to see its last moment.

If all time were a day, a couple seconds ago, we were just a collection of dumb apes rutting in the mud and chasing bears with sticks.

Arguably, little has changed. But at least we can now check Facebook as we rut.

If you are wearing something made of gold, it would’ve once been just hydrogen.

Then, as a star dies, it creates heavier and heavier materials until it gets to iron. In the ensuing explosion, in a brief fraction of a second, there’s a moment in which all other elements are created.

The debris is blown across the galaxy, until it found a home here on Earth, where someone found it, called it gold, melted it down, reformed it, and sold it to someone who sold it to someone else who sold it someone else who handed it to you.

You are wearing a star’s dying breath.

Whole galaxies change. Survive the next three and a half billion years, and you’d be treated to the cosmic spectacular of the Andromeda galaxy crashing into this one. Two massive clouds, made up of billions of stars and untold more planets, swirling around two supermassive black holes on a collision course that’d make a supernova look like a firecracker.

If there is a God, he sure does love a good firework show.

Of course, given the nature of anxiety, if you suggest the idea of exploding galaxies to it, you will be spending the next 48 hours on the phone with SpaceX begging them to strap you to the side of their next rocket out of here.

Anxiety does not do well with the idea of change at all. But in truth, anxiety’s nervousness about change is an elegant bluff it wants you to call. While it’ll go to work running you down the moment you commit to doing anything, change is what it most desires.

Understanding this is key to understanding anxiety. Stress – from whatever situation – is a catalyst for anxiety, and long-term stress normally stems from inflexibility in your life. It is the discord that comes from maintaining the status quo when your whole being wants change.

Imagine the true nature of the static existence we strive to create. Its purest form, the utopia of the ideal we seek, is heaven. Endless pleasure. Always being surrounded by loved ones. Forever. And ever. And ever. And ever. And ever. Amen.

Yet this is no heaven. It is eternal stagnation. An endless stasis. For without change, how do you even define yourself? You exist to exist, and nothing more. Is that not purgatory? Is that not hell?

Myself, I’m a pantheist. I believe that the only thing that could truly be described as Godlike in all of existence is the universe itself. It is God, or at least meets all the criteria to be a god, without our species-specific bullshit thrown on it. The terms “universe” and “God” are entirely interchangeable, with three notable distinctions.

1. The universe doesn’t have opposable thumbs, and is therefore incapable of writing any books.
2. The universe is too busy smashing galaxies together to care about what hat you wear, your attempts to control others, or where you stick your genitals.
3. The universe is always changing, all the time, and therefore is unlikely to sport the same beard and toga outfit for several millennia.

In this view of the universe, you accept change. You accept that change will be foisted on you, and you accept that there are changes you can make. Everything is temporary.

The Earth will likely be destroyed well before galaxies collide. Instead, it’ll be our Sun doing the last big singsong in Starland City. This change will be forced upon us. Whether humanity is there to see it happen are entirely down to changes we can make ourselves.

The same is true of every single human being walking the planet. Lives are finite, but how we live choose to live to us. Do we cower away in the moment and allow fear and insecurity to take it from us, or do we own the moment for ourselves? In embracing change and daring to alter that which makes you anxious, you are working with it to overcome it, rather than running from it. You are breaking its loop. You are setting it at ease. You are proving to it, and yourself, that fear does not own you.

Anxiety itself is not immune to change. It is the result of numerous small yet impactful changes over the years, slowly escalating towards an inflection point where it can no longer be ignored. But you arrive at that point because of change. Therefore, it’s purely logical that, with one small change at a time, you can start swinging it back towards the positive.

Anxiety is the result of change. It is the fear of further change. And yet, it is only change that can overcome it.

A year ago, I was fully in the grips of this ruinous condition. A year before that, I felt on top of the world. A year before that, I was falling in love. A year before that, I was burying a long-term depression. A year before that, I was far too drunk to accurately recall what happened.

Now, I’m back in my hometown and I’m improving rapidly – day-by-day. I came back to a place where I can draw strength from, and I’m funnelling that into changing aspects of my life that cause me stress – my work, my health, my drinking, and much more.

Anxiety can be undone. A person can transform. One small mental knot at a time.

Change is the one constant you can rely on.

And right here, right now, in the moment, the same is true. In fact, a moment is all we ever have. You don’t exist anywhere else. In this moment, I’m writing. The only evidence I have of past immediate moments are the words you just read, in a moment which has already passed for you. Ahead of us: possibility.

What will you do when you finish reading this? Will it be something you enjoy? Will it be something you emotionally benefit from? Will it be something you’ve been putting off? Or just do nothing? Either way, when the moment comes for you to decide, the choice is yours.

And that’s the point. Even in the midst of a panic attack, or when you feel all is lost, or when depression has got you down to the point where you see no way out – know that there’s going to be another moment.

It will pass, because everything does. You will have the opportunity to change things, because you always will.

Until you don’t.

Everything is temporary.

 

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