Everything stays, but it still changes.
Ever so slightly, daily and nightly.
In little ways, when everything stays.
– Marceline the Vampire Queen, “Adventure Time”

Welcome to my cliche end-of-the-year column wherein I reflect upon how things change and how you must accept that as a part of life. The concept is nothing groundbreaking and I don’t have much to add to it, but I hope I can shed some unique light on this idea by sharing my recent realization that everything is in a constant state of fluctuation.

Some people say that the only constant is change, but what does that phrase even mean? Sure, change is the only thing in life that can be reliably expected, but it goes deeper than that. Change is constant. It happens every second of every day, whether we notice it or not. But it’s only in times of great inconsistency and change that we start to worry about it and wish that nothing had to change.

A helpful piece of advice I’ve found is that I need to stop acting like life is in a state of consistency that is occasionally broken up by fluctuations of the status quo. Instead, I should see it for what it truly is: an ever-changing state of chaos in which very few things remain steady for a significant amount of time.

When I was in high school, I thought the people I hung out with were constants in my life. Now that I’ve graduated, they’re gone. I don’t rejoice in that fact but I don’t mourn over it either. It is simply the way things go. The way things need to go if life is to continue.

As another year of college passes, as I lose more friends to graduation and fear never seeing them again and the reality of my own graduation inches ever closer, I accept the flow of time. Nothing lasts forever. To think otherwise is stubborn and foolish. If I try to hold on to that which will inevitably leave, I will end up with nothing but heartbreak. For now, I’ll just try to appreciate what I have while I have it. The tiny moments of beauty within the sea of unknowable calamity, the life-altering relationships, everything.

It was fun while it lasted.