The Fallacy of Constancy

We find patterns in the world to trick ourselves into believing that life is predictable.

Don’t know about you but I crave constancy. I love the dull and mundane. I thrive on the predictability of some aspects of life. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that life should have some excitement, but can’t excitement be planned? There can be an allocated portion of one’s day given to “planned spontaneity” right?

We naturally find patterns around us to help us understand the world. We divide people by their color, language, religion, and gender. We prescribe labels to classification of fauna. And when we are done putting everything we know tangible into clusters of meaning, we break down those classifications and relabel everything in an utter mundane process of “understanding our world”.

But why?

Because we crave constancy. We need it to feel like we have control over our world and in turn our situations. When a natural disaster strikes, we look out for the signs that caused such a feat. We don’t believe it was random forces. We find patterns to attribute the disaster to — the wind change, the shift in tectonic plates, the lack of prayer from that side of the world. And we look out for the signs that signal the next big thing.

But are we any closer to knowing the future then we were a thousand years ago? We have the atomic clock, but they move according to human calculations. We had prophets, but 2012 has come and gone. Yet, we won’t accept that life is unpredictable. We will continue to look for the pattern. We will continue to attribute the cause of one occurrence to the previous action. Because there has to be a pattern. There has to be a consistency. Life can’t be a series of unfortunate events thrown aimlessly together to form a moment in time.

The fallacy of constancy is believing that we are in control of our destnies. It is thinking that we are the captain of our own souls when in actual fact who knows what tomorrow brings?

I take solace in the fact that though life is unpredictable (no matter how uneasy the thought makes me) I place my trust in something higher and perfectly constant. The fallacy of constancy was trying to find it in this lifetime when it can only be found in eternity.