The anguish of finalising

Finalising things, be it an academic paper, a piece of music, a blogpost or even a single sentence can be anguish. The preceding sentence is a case-in-point. It took me a while to even type it down. Thoughts and ideas are a process in constant flux, ever changing. What happens when we try to externalise them is that we give them shape and structure, we "set them in stone" and we deprive them of their ever changing nature. In a sense we kill them.

That came off slightly dramatic, but I think it's true. Of course, there's always the possibility of coming back, picking them up again and once more incorporate them into our stream of thought. But between then and now other things have happened, and due to their relational nature they are not the same anymore.

Perhaps saying that we "pick them up again" is wrong. Maybe a better way of putting it is to say that writing or creating is part of that ever changing process. That process, that stream of thought, is constantly interacting with other processes and is also generating entirely new ones. Seen in this way, we do not produce an "object" when we write something down - rather we initiate yet another process which may in time come to influence our stream of thought.

What it comes down to, I think, is our ambivalent relation to change. Change is constant and inevitable, yet for our very survival we do need to resist it to some extent, simply in order to maintain "structural integrity". This, I think, holds true at every level. Biologically in the sense that we maintain the molecular strucutural integrity and not just literally melt away and get absorbed by what surrounds us. Psychologically in order to maintain some form of identity and sense of "self". Sociologically in order to maintain a structure for society.

The problem is that we tend to take these structures to be finite, discrete "objects" rather than ever changing processes. We identify with the impermanent structures rather than with the process itself. Perhaps this is an inevitable function of the structures themselves, a part in maintaining the structures in the first place. But what we end up with is a fearful resistance to change.

And a difficulty in commiting thoughts to such a trivial thing as a blog.