Hubris.

  A quick definition search brings up arrogance and an excess of pride or self-confidence. In Greek tragedy it was equally marked by a defiance of the gods. 

  Humans build things we believe will last forever. These structures will eventually crumble within years, decades, centuries or millennia. We erect statues and monuments to ourselves or our heroes and they too inevitably topple in Time. 

  Nothing is permanent. Everything is in the process of change. 

  It’s not just the fabrications of humankind. The earth convulses and over Time mountains rise. I gather Everest, the tallest of them all, is still rising! But even mountains erode and crumble! The Time spans are beyond human reckoning but inexorable all the same. 

  However, through all this continuous ongoing change a different sort of change is taking place. A change that is less a ‘change’ than a Flow. 

  Change: “to make (someone or something) different; to alter or modify… or…to replace something with something else.”

  Can you see the fixity implied by the above definitions of ‘change?’ The sense of altering or modifying one static state for another?

  Contrast that with Flow: “(of a fluid, gas, or electricity) move along or out steadily and continuously in a current or stream.”

  The stasis or fixity has evaporated, dissolved, and now we are dealing with something, whether fluid, gas, or electricity that is moving along or ‘out steadily’ and continuously in a current or stream. 

  Now try as best you can to imagine Life Flowing along or out instead of the fluid, gas or electricity. Picture a parent and child—indeed human or animal, any living being in fact!—and try to imagine WHAT it is that has Flowed from the older generation to the younger. 

  That is Life. 

  We are Life! 

  And we are one with a vast inconceivably intertwined and interacting Oneness of Flow we feebly label ‘Nature.’ 

  Here’s where things get weird though: incredibly, inexplicably, we humans have evolved a way of communicating using signs and language the complexity of which sets us far apart from the animal kingdom we emerged from. 

  As an aside, I like the use of that word ‘weird.’ Weird: “suggesting something supernatural, uncanny.” 

  Finally, here’s where hubris comes back in: for our language is built on static definitions and fixed concepts, and these are changing but NOT Flowing things. 

  The systems and ideological structures we erect using language crumble as inexorably as the buildings and monuments we arrogantly (weirdly) believe will last forever. 

  And once they inevitably do we humans must learn to Flow once more. 

  We will always be builders…

  Can we learn to Flow again?