It has been my opinion for many years now that a human cannot stay permanently the same or to stop developing and maintain the available level. Trying to maintain the existing situation leads to degradation. Once you stop, degradation kicks in. So how could we maintain the resistance to change while avoiding degradation if we really, really want it?

There is probably no way to maintain a permanent status quo over all aspects of life. However, there could be a way if we wanted to maintain the situation in a limited area or in a single aspect of the life. Change and learning could be moved, at the expense of some loss in effectiveness, from one area to another.

Strangely, the nowadays popular “minimalists” have made me think about it. Simply put, they resist clutter in their lives and homes. Leaving aside all the positive effects, many of them basically manage to resist changes in the level of material possessions they have. Some of them go as far as to live with just one hundred things for years. And at the same time they are active, creative people.

There is a difference between passively refusing change and actively resisting it. If you simply refuse to change and stay put, you will not learn anything new and will start forgetting the old, so you go down the degradation path. But you can also start actively resisting the changes, analysing them, finding new creating ways to avoid new things coming into your life. That makes you advance in other areas, like creative living, and certainly would keep you as a whole from degradation.

Basically, it is not the end that matters but the means. As long as we are active, as long as we are analysing, thinking, creating, life goes on. This all comes back somewhat to the well-known: “Live the life, do not let it happen to you.”