'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict

  A Change Is As Good As A Rest

Things are always changing. People talk about ‘Climate Change’, but they couldn’t point to a year when the climate was ‘normal’. Not only is everything constantly changing around you, but you are also ‘in a state of flux’ which makes it virtually impossible to monitor change without the assumption of a constant point. Hence, you can come up with contradictory statistics on any subject that you care to name. This less than restful fact underlies our state of being and may also account for our quest, you could almost say yearning for a spiritual constant.

Motion is one of the most discernable symptoms of change and one, which produces a theory I’m fond of, mainly because it’s my own. Imagine two cars driving in opposite directions on parallel tracks. They are both travelling at say sixty miles an hour, which means that in relationship to one another, they are travelling at one hundred and twenty miles an hour, a fact that would be dramatically confirmed should they be travelling on the same track. In other words, speed can only be determined by one objects relationship to another. Now, imagine two objects travelling at the speed of light in opposite directions. They are travelling at twice the speed of light in relationship to one another, but it is supposedly impossible for anything to go faster than the speed of light! As with the spiritual supposition of a constant, the statement relies on a theoretical constant, which overrides the two objects relationship to one another, but nevertheless, should the two objects collide, their impact would confirm them to be travelling at twice the speed of light, because in collision each object had de facto become the constant of the other. In other words, it is not possible to travel at more than the speed of light, but it is possible to crash at twice that speed, or move towards or away from another object at twice that speed.

So it seems that science cannot do without a constant, cannot do without God, if you like. We could therefore go on to say that ‘God is change’ or alternatively ‘God is rest’, which are contradictory statements but would make some sense of ‘being laid’ or ‘being laid to rest’ though not much. I will content myself by saying that ‘change is good’ and ‘rest is good’ but not always and not all of the time. In spite of this I would still like to think that God is good all of the time, even though that let’s the Devil in. It is all Ying and Yang in the end, a feast of opposites.

Life is as paradoxical as the statement we started out with. We should relish having such a magical existence where everything seems as real and solid as you like, but nothing has permanence and anything can be demonstrated to be something other than it seems to be, in an infinite number of ways.

Well, we have travelled down this road together and I am certainly not the same as I was when we started. How can I know? Well, you can always tell by whether you need a rest or feel like you’ve just had one.   

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