Nothing lasts forever. A reality that I'm not the most fond of. How nice it would be to buy a washing machine once and have it last at least the rest of your life or clean the house once and have it stay clean. My darn clothes always wear out and get holes too soon and then I can't even find the same things again because fashion has changed or they've changed the fit of my favourite jeans. Then the new clothes fall apart even quicker than the old ones, because they just don't make them like they used to. The impermanence of things is definitely a life lesson the universe seems determined I need to learn.
In all seriousness, though, change can be exhilarating or stressful, sometimes even both. It's a fact of life, but when it's stressful it's good to have some constants in life as a crutch to get you through. Sadly at some point those crutches inevitably get removed, so then how do you handle that?
For some people the lack of stability throughout their lives leads them to turning to smoking, alcohol or drugs as a crutch. Unfortunately this usually just perpetuates the cycle often passing it on to the next generation and leading to an early death. Others might have started with a stable life then had everything completely turned upside down; think economic collapse or war.
Change stands out all the more when you look into history, a topic I find fascinating. Yet the real irony is that the one constant that never seems to change is human nature. The things we complain about today were the very same things endured hundreds and even thousands of years ago, they have merely evolved with technology and way of life.
I love that things have survived through the years giving us a glimpse of those who created them so long ago. However, it always comes with a bit of sadness knowing that the people who created them or used them are long gone. Very little will have survived and much of what we know, or at least think we know, about people throughout history comes from written accounts found from those times. I think most historians will acknowledge that personal accounts will always come with a bias.
What we've pieced together of the collapse of the Roman empire was from historical reports from those who were literate enough to write accounts down. Yet more recently archeological finds tell a slightly different story in the lives of most people. From accounts, cities were abandoned and civilisation lost from them and while many did move out of them it seems those who stayed merely adjusted their way of life to the changing circumstances. What constitutes civilisation depends on the person. The ones who left went to rural communities and monastic communities taking their skills with them to be used there instead.
Perhaps the constant thread that goes through time unchanging is human nature, both the good, the bad and that range in between. It just adapts to the changing world repeating cycles of rising to complex heights and collapsing back to more simplistic strategies as cohesion breaks down on the larger scale.
I don't think this thought thread went where I was expecting or reached any real conclusion like I thought it would.