ON ENDURING RELATIONSHIPS

What is the secret formula for preventing a relationship that was once sweet, loving and charming from becoming bitter and hateful and the two parties drift apart and end their once endearing relationship after a few years? The answer is their refusal to recognize that:

To exist is to change
To change is to mature
To mature is to go on
Creatings oneself endlessly.

Having come together once, impressed by the qualities in each other, they expect the other to continue to possess the same qualities always without losing any of those; they get disappointed and become strangers to each other. They forget that each one of them is not frozen in time; their minds have retained a memory of the past and refuse to recognize that change is an inherent and necessary fact of their passage in the river of life. The measure of the strength of their bond is their willingness to accept the change they perceive in each other and recognize that they themselves have to change to enable a mature relationship grow in strength. This process of change continued and nourished endlessly with love and understanding vests the relationship with a long life.

Many philosophers have commented on the element of Change that is an integral part of our existence. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus has made the famous observation:: "You cannot step in the same river twice" - because the flowing river is ever changing and the individual too is similarly changing. The infant child grows in size and its mind continuously changes. “How you have changed, I cannot recognize you, almost” is a constant refrain of friends and acquaintances meeting after an interval. Expecting one’s partner to remain unchanged is contrary to the life-process.

Kahlil Gibran’s advice:

Let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Sing and dance together and be joyous, but each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

And stand together yet not too near together;
For the pillars of the temple stand apart.

And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.

Rage against of the dying of the light

On Probability Statements:
"The Median is not the Message"
by Stephen Jay Gould

(Late) Stephen Jay Gould was an eminent paleontologist and evolutionary biologist. At an young age (41) he suffered from a serious and rare cancer ‑‑abdominal mesothelioma, associated with exposure to asbestos. Accoording to medical research statistics, mesothelioma is incurable, with a median mortality of eight months after discovery. He however, was fully cured.

In the article reproduced below, Gould discusses the need to interpret statistical data fully and correctly. Rather than giving up hope, he wrote that he used his knowledge of statistics to translate an apparent death sentence into the hopeful realization that half those in whom the disease was diagnosed survived longer than eight months, perhaps much longer, giving him the strength to fight on. He died in 2002 at the age of 60.


"We still carry the historical baggage of a Platonic heritage that seeks sharp essences and definite boundaries. This leads us to view statistical measures of central tendency wrongly -- indeed, opposite to the appropriate interpretation -- in our actual world of variation, shadings and continua. In short, we view means and medians as the hard realities, and the variations that permit their calculation as a set of transient and imperfect measurements of this hidden essence. If the median is the reality and the variation around the median just a device for its calculation, the statement: `I will probably be dead in eight months' may pass as a reasonable interpretation.

But all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency. Means and medians are the abstractions. Referring to the statistically derived information about probable death in eight months in the case of those suffering from abdominal mesothemia, Gould observed after examining the complete data which yielded the median of eight months:

"The distribution was strongly rightly skewed and, as I had guessed, with a long tail (however small) to the right that extended for several years above the eight‑month median. I saw no reason why I should not be in that small tail, and I breathed a long sigh of relief. I had read the graph correctly. I had asked the right questions and found the answers. I had obtained, in all probability, that most precious of all possible gifts in the circumstances: substantial time. I didn't have to stop immediately and follow Isaiah's injunction to Hezekiah: `set thine house in order; for thou shalt die and not live.' I would have time to think, plan and fight.

One final point about statistical distributions: they apply only to a prescribed set of circumstances; in this case, to the survival with mesothelioma under conventional modes of treatment. If circumstances changed, the distribution might alter. I was placed on an experimental protocol of treatment, and if fortune holds, will be in the first cohort of a new distribution with a high median and a right tail extending to death by natural causes at an advanced old age. I possessed everyone of the characteristics conferring a probability of longer life: I was young; my disease had been recognized in a relatively early stage. I would receive the nation's best medical treatment; I had the world to live for.

I knew how to read the data properly and not despair. I agree with the preacher of Ecclesiastes that there is a time to live and a time to die and when my skein runs out, I hope to face the end calmly and in my own way. For most situations however, I prefer the more martial view that death is the ultimate enemy and find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.

EVOLUTION

Events of great rarity make history
by (late) Stephen Jay Gould

Nothing much happens for most of the time when evidence abounds; everything happens in largely unrecorded geological moments. We could attribute this pattern to either a devious or humorous God, out to confuse us or merely to chuckle at our frustration. But I choose to look upon this phenomenon in a positive light, for it is trying to tell us something important. There is a lesson, not merely frustration, in the message that change is concentrated in infrequent bursts and that stability is the usual nature of species and systems at any moment.
Evolution has constructed the tree of life; yet, at almost any moment for any species, change is not occurring and stasis prevails. If we then ask, What is the normal nature of a species, the only possible reply is, stability. Yet exquisitely rare change has built the tree of life and made history on a broad scale. The defining property of a species, its normal state, its nature, its appearance at almost any time, is thus contrary to the process that makes history (and new species). If we tried to infer the nature of species from the process that constructs the history of life, we would get everything precisely backward! -- for events of great rarity (but with extensive consequence) make history.
This same tension and contrast exist between human nature and the events that construct our history. We have committed an enormous error in assuming that the behavioral traits involved in history-making events must define the ordinary properties of human nature. Must we not link the causes of our history, or so the false argument goes, to the nature of our being?
But if my analogy holds, precisely the opposite may be true. If rare behaviors make history, then our usual nature must be defined by our ordinary actions in an everyday world that engulfs us nearly all the time, but does not set the fate of nations. The causes of history may be opposed to the ordinary forces that prevail at almost any moment -- just as the processes that construct the tree of life are invisible and inactive nearly all the time within stable species.
History is made by warfare, greed, lust for power, hatred, and xenophobia (with some other, more admirable motives thrown in here and there). We therefore often assume that these obviously human traits define our essential nature. How often have we been told that "man" is, by nature, aggressive and selfishly acquisitive?
What do we see on any ordinary day on the streets or in the homes of any American city -- even in the subways of New York? Thousands of tiny and insignificant acts of kindness and consideration. We step aside to let someone pass, smile at a child, chat aimlessly with an acquaintance or even with a stranger.......Many of us have the impression that daily life is an unending series of unpleasantness ......but think about it seriously for a moment. Such levels of nastiness cannot possibly be sustained. Society would devolve to anarchy in an instant if half our overtures to another human being were met with a pinch in the nose
Why then do most of us have the impression that people are so aggressive, and intrinsically so? The answer, I think, lies in the asymmetry of effects -- the truly tragic side of human existence. Unfortunately, one incident of violence can undo ten thousand acts of kindness, and we easily forget the predominance of kindness over aggression by confusing effect with frequency. One racially motivated beating can wipe out years of patient education for respect and toleration in a school or community. One murder can convert a friendly town, replete with trust, into a nexus of fear with people behind barred doors, suspicious of everyone and afraid to go out at night. Kindness is so fragile, so easy to efface; violence is so powerful.
This crushing and tragic asymmetry of kindness and violence is infinitely magnified when we consider the causes of history in the large. One book burning in the library of Alexandria can wipe out the accumulated wisdom of antiquity. One supposed insult, one crazed act of assassination, can undo decades of patient diplomacy, cultural exchanges, peace corps, pen pals -- small acts of kindness involving millions of citizens -- and bring two nations to a war that no one wants, but that kills millions and irrevocably changes the paths of history.
The alternative view might grant that stability must rule at nearly all moments and that much rarer events make history. But perhaps this stability arises by predominant behaviors of geniality only in relatively free and democratic societies. Perhaps the stability of most cultures has been achieved by the same `dark' forces that make history when they break out of balance -- fear, aggression, terror, domination of rich over poor, men over women, adults over children, and armed over defenseless. I allow that these forces have often kept balances, but still strongly assert that we fail to count the ten thousand ordinary acts of non-aggression -- done if only because people know their places and do not usually challenge the sources of order -- that overwhelm each overt show of strength even in societies structured by domination. To base daily stability on anything other than our natural geniality requires a perverted social structure explicitly dedicated to breaking the human soul -- the Auschwitz model, if you will.........Obviously, both kindness and violence lie within the bounds of our nature because we perpetuate both, in spades. I only advance a structural claim that social stability rules nearly all the time and must be based on an overwhelmingly predominant (but tragically ignored) frequency of genial acts, and that geniality is therefore our usual and preferred response nearly all the time.
This is not an essay about optimism; it is an essay about tragedy. If I felt that humans were nasty by nature, I would just say, the hell with it. We get what we deserve, or what evolution left us as a legacy. But the center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days. Nothing can be more tragic than that this Everest of geniality stands upside down on its pointed summit and can be toppled so easily by rare events contrary to our everyday nature -- and that these rare events make our history. In some sense, we do not get what we deserve.
The solution to our woes lies not in overcoming our `nature' but in fracturing the `great asymmetry', and allowing our ordinary propensities to direct our lives. But how can we put the commonplace into the driver's seat of history?
Stephen Jay Gould who wrote this article teaches biology, geology, and the history of science at Harvard University.