Change and Stability

2010-07-29

There are three kinds of people who:

1. Embrace the change.

2. Resist the change but ultimately change due to crisis.

3. Don't change even by crisis and go extinct.

We can say there is another kind of people who actively seek out change and implement (even when there is no necessity to do so). People who embrace the change don't actively seek to change but when presented with opportunity they accept, adopt, survive and flourish.

It should also be mentioned that these four classifications are not classification of people as such but about their behaviours in different spheres of life. Each individual may have all the four behaviour traits in different ratios in different facets of life. I may be very adventurous (seeking out change) in one walk but timid and conservative (risk averse) in another walk of life.

Having discussed the nature of change-behaviour we need to remind ourselves it is only one side of the coin. Stability is the other side and is as much important for survival and progress.

"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order."

        - Alfred North Whitehead

Order is stability. You need 'stable' environment for 'change' to operate. You need 'change' to maintain order.

"We live in our desires not in our achievements"

    - Quote from Reader's Digest.

Achievements = Stability.

Desires = Change.

We are surviving by what we have already achieved (academic qualification, job/business, invention, performance...) but we LIVE in our desires, that is what we want to achieve from now onwards.

"It is the ordinary who give stability and the extra-ordinary who change the world"

    - Quote from Reader's Digest.

Our bodies are good examples of order and change in harmony.

Again there is no hard-and-fast set-in-stone separation of ordinary and extra-ordinary people. We need to understand these as behaviours which can exhibit in different ratios in all of us under different circumstances. A healthy (not necessarily equal) ratio of both behaviours is required for....healthy individual/life.

What applies to individuals also applies to family, group, community, society, nation, countries and the world, in fact for any system to be a system!

SYSTEM = an arrangement/organization/pattern of inter-related, inter-acting, inter-dependent components and processes.