Changes by Charles Bradley and The Budos Band
In most stories, a character embarks on a journey, either a practical or theoretical one, that will, against all odds, for better or worse, force them to change. We’ll learn about this character’s backbone, their constitution, just by how much, or how quickly, they submit to this inevitable change, what of their old self they leave behind.
There’s a relatively new, ubiquitous trend: tales of a protagonist’s trajectory with no progress, no alteration. The goal is to make a statement on the falsehood of most narrative structures, on how people thrive to change but never actually do. How life remains the same, and for the most part, with age, gets a little worse, a little more annoying.
I somewhat disagree with the depressing message of this new trend. I think audiences never believe these stories, or at least never want to, and therefore have trouble relating to them. In reality—which is what as a writer I wish to portray, in some form or another—people do change, even when they don’t strive to. It’s actually when people are just themselves, living their lives without any grand desire for alteration, that they change the most. Change is inevitable. It also isn’t progress (sorry to all my fellow Americans, with your stupid manifest destiny)—it’s just a fact of life. The unavoidability of change is often annoying. It’s sort of like the stock market, which mirrors the cyclical nature of human existence.
I like the saying, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, because it represents a fantastical illusion. It tells people to leave things alone if they aren’t problematic. Of course, humans don’t know how to leave things alone, we meddle in anything and everything in order to occupy our minds, avoid banality, the existentially torturous feeling of stagnancy (an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom - Baudelaire). Though in reality, just by being stagnant, change occurs. Whether that change will be positive or negative depends on the circumstances. I think the wisdom of living, which I haven’t yet grasped, is knowing exactly when to act and when to let things pan out on their own, when to let fate step in. Either way, everything will eventually break.