Children

Here's a post I'd written previously and never published because I'd left it partially incomplete.

"Change is the only constant" I'm sure you've heard of this well known platitude at least once in your life. But if you actually think about it, isn't it a bit contradictory? To say that change is constant implies some sort of constancy albeit at a meta level. As human beings we always look for things like patterns, causality and try to predict what may happen. Even though the sentiment of this statement is correct, it is this human need for everything to fall in line, perhaps only in an analysis at a higher level of abstraction which it betrays. A better image which expresses this statement would be that the universe is like a child which is only beginning to feel out its surroundings. It creates sand castles or expresses joy in the same moment as it brutally steps on and destroys some plants or bugs, yet we would never be able to resent it for its destruction for it is done with a sort of naïve innocence. It continuously and erratically creates and destroys, it is us humans who try to rationalize its actions and find an intrinsic pattern.

In this same vain, Human existence itself is like a child thrown into water. When we are able to see the deep and dark depths of suffering and also potential, we would rather grasp at straws or floating rings thrown to us by others instead of learning to swim. When we get used to others throwing us these floating rings we slowly transform into circus animals until the point is reached where the floating rings become hoops which are being continuously thrown to us by others and we have to either once again go under the surface or keep jumping as the circus looks at us for entertainment.

Instead of trying to jump through hoops like a circus animal for the entertainment of people around you who you throw hoops to with your own behavior, a certain laughter is needed; Which laughs at the traditions and dogmas of people and institutions who take themself too seriously and continues to figure out its own path without being affected by them anyway. That is the superhuman laughter Nietzsche talks about, which is seen in the innocence and integrity of a child's laughter but beaten out of them by the matrix of pain and pleasure in society.