On Change: The Majesty of Creation

Everything changes. Everything is in a state of evolution. Even religion. This is a basic Baha'i belief. Vafa expresses his love for observing the process of change in this remarkable blog reflection. - gw



This evening was an interesting one. My father was interviewed on the phone by a Canadian Baha’i Persian radio station. We kept very quiet for the duration of it. It went really well apparently. Later on in the evening, before I went to bed, I told my parents that it looked likely at this point that a tropical storm or hurricane would form in the Gulf of Mexico and hit us in the next 48 hours. He looked puzzled, and asked me a very good question, as always. Why was I so interested in the weather? And I made reply. It is not the weather that interests me, persay, but change which interests me. The weather is ever-changing, and one can see it most beautifully in the tropics and how it changes continuously, spinning up storms and hurricanes. One can watch the clouds spin in almost real time and see how lows form and winds increase and so on. It is this that is interesting to me, one can look at computer models of those changes and compare them to each other and see how they evolve too. The clouds and the rain do not interest, but how they change interests. It is by no means restricted to this, however. No matter what it is, whether it be stock prices, company plans, government changes, wars, viruses such as bird flu, watching how communities, countries, populations change, belief patterns change, Faiths grow, mature and interact, history itself—these are what interest me. As one watches such things continuously, one begins to get a feel for them, a feel for how they have changed and will change. It is exciting; to watch how one’s predictions compare to reality, adjust them, watch again, take in more information, adjust again. At the end of the day, one sees the majesty of creation, because that is what it is—it’s flux, always changing, always evolving, never the same, just like life on this planet and this planet itself, the oceans, the reefs, the continents, the ecosystems, Gaia, so to speak. It’s what makes music so beautiful, because it’s never the same, no note is quite the same because each time it is surrounded by an environment of new notes and new prior melodies. Each verse, each repetition of the melody adds something new and beautiful to the equation. Watching how people change--themselves, how they grow, how they look different in time, how they think differently, plan differently, feel differently, how their interactions and relationships change—that is fascinating. In fact, I think that’s why I’m doing a PhD in developmental biology—it’s the closest I could get to trying to figure out the mystery of life changes. He joked. Was I interested then in watching fishes swim in fish bowls then—because they’re changing all the time too. In fact, I said, yes, I do, I watch them all the time…

posted by Vafa Bayat at 12:28 AM 24 July 2006, "48 hours," Vafa's Blog: My Thoughts on Life