Change is the essence of life. Or as Herbert Spencer put it in his Principles of Biology: ‘a living thing is distinguished from a dead thing by the multiplicity of the changes at any moment taking place in it.’ A commitment to changelessness is not only unfortunate, it is impossible. Rigidity is its sin; death is its wages.

I have become more open, more knowledgeable, more thoughtful, more aware of the God who stands by. I have learned that there is more than only way to do a thing. ‘Wisdom,’ Octavio Paz said, ‘lies neither in fixity not in change, but in the dialectic between the two.

Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope

Joan D. Chittister  (page 26)