For as long as I can remember, people have been saying that there is so much change these days, but ‘these days’ of change have been going on for a long time now for them to be seen as something new. Perhaps a better way to look at it is to acknowledge that there has always been a lot of change, but when we look back over earlier days, it is often the things that stayed constant that we now remember most. And there always will be much that stay constant. You will often hear people say that ‘change is the only constant’, but that simply isn’t true. Think about your own life now. For every thing that is in the process of change, there is much, much more that is staying the same (for now). Our attention in the present is drawn to what is changing (understandably so, because change presents elements of both threat and opportunity), and we tend to lose sight of what is staying the same. But, when we look back over the past, it is often what persisted over time that is to the fore, thereby giving us a slightly distorted picture of the role of change and constancy.
The more complex reality, of course, is that, wherever we look – past, present or future, there will be elements of change and elements of constancy, and the two will be interacting in complex ways. For a long time now there has been a tendency to adopt an oversimplified view of change and not see the fuller picture…
