Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin'
And you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'

                        — Bob Dylan, “The Times, They Are a- Changin’ ”

Along with our times, our lives today are indeed “a-changing,” to borrow that term from Bob Dylan’s famous old song. Our current times today in 2024, sixty long years after Dylan first released his song, continue to undergo constant changes.

The recent Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the still impending global ecological collapse, are among such constantly ongoing changes in our times. So are such political things as the United States’ Presidential election set for this fall. So, too, are the ever-different items and brands appearing on the shelves of our grocery, department, and other walk-in stores, and advertised on all our current information media. Those media themselves are constantly being updated as well, as the information technology on which they are founded is subject to constant change of its own, making what is coming next already obsolete even before it appears.  

In such constantly changing times, we live lives that are themselves always undergoing endless changes in those lives’ content. In that sense, in our constantly changing times, we ourselves live constantly changing lives.  Accordingly, used in a corresponding way, the term ‘changing’ in the expression “changing lives” functions adjectively, describing the lives at issue — just as it does in Dylan’s song about “changing times.”

However, only on the very rarest of occasions do any of us during any times, from ancient or even pre-historic ages up though the various ages of modernity and even our currently ongoing often-called “post-modern” age, undergo a changing of our very own lives themselves. In no age whatsoever is it common for any of us to undergo changes to our lives themselves as a whole, rather than merely to the passing events and elements within those lives. Used to express what is relevant for that case, in talk of “changing lives” the word ‘changing’ functions as a gerund, rather than as an adjective —  much as it does when we speak of “changing clothes.”  

Thus, our lives of constant change almost always remain the same old un-changed lives. That is to say we live lives filled full to overflowing with just more of the same old stuff, merely continually reprocessed under new brand-names and a never-ending myriad of new flavors, as it were.

It is thus, in our times, as if our lives were meant for no more than the never ceasing drinking of ever new sorts of liquor.

Never will we know his fabulous head
where the eyes' apples slowly ripened. Yet
his torso glows: a candelabrum set
before his gaze which is pushed back and hid,

restrained and shining. Else the curving breast
could not thus blind you, nor through the soft turn
of the loins could this smile easily have passed
into the bright groins where the genitals burned.

Else stood this stone a fragment and defaced,
with lucent body from the shoulders falling,
too short, not gleaming like a lion's fell;

nor would this star have shaken the shackles off,
bursting with light, until there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

            — Rainer Maria Rilke, “Torso of an Archaic Apollo” (1908)[1]

A saying that is sometimes to be heard in meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous is that for alcoholics to give up drinking what is needed is not a change of anything, but rather a change of everything. That is, to recover from alcoholism, alcoholics must change their lives as a whole — their whole orientation toward and within their lives, affecting how they approach each and every new day, and make each and every new decision they are faced with making throughout every new day.

Changing their lives in that fundamental and all-embracing way is the only true solution not only to alcoholism, but also to any other addiction.

The very possibility of such change of life as a whole must first be revealed to one in the experience of a moment of clear vision. One must, in effect, be brought to a point at which one at last experiences a clear, all-embracing choice — the choice between continuing to go through one’s days the way one always has up to that very moment of vision, or else changing one’s whole life from that moment forth.

Our contemporary capitalist society as a whole, however, is itself no less than a global system of addiction. When it eventually bottoms out—as it inevitably will—we will all have a collective moment of vision that presents us with the opportunity of truly living, instead of merely continuing to consume ever more of what goes on sale next. Sooner or later, we will all reach that moment of fundamental life-embracing choice.

May we all, in our times today, be given eyes to see and ears to hear that we must change our lives!

[1] Translation by C. F. MacIntyre in Rilke: Selected Poems (University of California Press, 1956).

Note to readers: this will be my last post before my regular summer break. My next post will go up on September 9 this coming fall of 2024.