Heroes Not Zombies

At the edge of the sea where the waves break onto the sad, sometimes you find an area like this, filled with pebbles and bubbling, foaming water. The hissing sound of the water as thousands of bubbles burst, and the clattering sound of the pebbles as they are tumbled back and forth by the waves is a beautiful sound.

When I look at this image I see the contrast between the foam and the stone. The foam lasts seconds, maybe a couple of minutes at most. The stones look permanent. They seem unchanging. But of course, they’re not. The reason that they are so smooth and rounded and glistening is due to the fact that they are undergoing constant transformation by the water. As they are washed and soaked by the water and rattled over each other by the waves, they change all the time, losing atoms to the sea, having their rough surfaces smoothed, and gradually, gradually, being reduced to sand.

The big difference between the foam and the stone is one of duration. Both are impermanent. Both are constantly changing. It’s just that the water does all that much more quickly than the stone does. In fact, the stone does it so slowly that we are mislead into thinking that the pebbles are permanent, eternal, unchanging. They’re not.

The other thing which strikes me when I look at this photo is how it reveals the fundamental truth that everything that exists is constantly being transformed by the encounters it makes with other things. We tend to think of the world as being made up of separate, easily identifiable, different objects – whether they are stones, trees, lakes or creatures.

But what about thinking about the world as made up of subjects, not objects? If everything (I really need to find another word for “thing” because just by using that I turn the world into a collection of objects!) which exists is in constant relationships with others….similar others, and totally different others…..and if those relationships change each of the partners through their encounters and experiences then maybe its better to think of the world as a community of subjects.

The world – not a collection of disconnected objects which can be standardised and replicated, but a community of subjects who co-inhabit the same planet and who resist standardisation through the perpetual transformations of being which emerge from their encounters.

Becoming, not being.

A finite, temporal world of encounters and experiences.

When I think of life this way I find a feeling of resistance arise in me – a resistance in the face of commodification, objectification, standardisation and control. It drives my desire for freedom, feeds my curiosity and opens me to the formation of new relationships and the experience of new encounters, every, single, day.