It really does mess a bit with the brain when you try to find the end state of a particular situation only to then realize that the situation is dynamic, always changing, hardly fixed.
This is especially true in longer timeframes for situations with less biological aspect to them.
By that, I mean that when we look at human institutions, relationships, ideas, or technologies, we expect things we've built with our hands and minds to reach some final form where all the variables settle. But they never do. The end state keeps retreating.
For example and in some sense, a human life is a situation, in that it unfolds through stages we can never fully predict from the beginning, shaped by forces both internal and external.
You don't know at twenty what matters at forty and can't see from childhood how grief will reshape you, or which chance encounter will redirect everything. The situation of "being you" is never finalized until it ends.
Now, a human life doesn't lack any dynamism at all, to be alive means to not be in a static state.
Processes of life that share this type of journey of growth and decay are also replicated within processes that strictly don't have any life in them.
I wonder what's the cause here. Is it the simple explanation of as above, so below? And below in this sense being the processes without life in them?
Somehow, everything that has life is upstream of anything that doesn't have life. The right framing I'm trying to get here is what has life creates what doesn't have life to mimic what has life. If you will, a cycle is formed in the process with a short circuit somewhere in between.
We build cities that grow and age like organisms. These things aren't necessarily alive, but they move through time with the same restless energy and refusal to stay put.
Or is it the reverse? Maybe the arrow points the other way entirely.
As in what we call "life" is just matter that learned to harness patterns that were already there within the flow toward complexity and back toward simplicity. Mountains erode. Stars are born and die.
Still, I doubt whether the latter has some practical utility.
It could be that when we build things that grow and change and eventually crumble, we're not imposing life's pattern onto dead matter.
We're just continuing what matter was already doing, which is another iteration of the same fundamental restlessness and inability to be still.
This theme of impermanence isn't easy on the human need for certainty, yet it's the arena we have to play in.
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