Permanence by Jamie Kirkpatrick

In case you haven’t noticed, change is in the wind. For some, it’s welcome; for others, it’s more than change. It’s chaos, and it’s frightening. But whether you like change or not, we’re in for a wild ride.

So, let’s pivot to permanence. Something rock-solid, something unmovable, maybe a place that will stand the test of time. A place of safety, a retreat, a refuge, protection from the gales that are starting to blow. I know: a castle!

The one pictured above is Dunvegan Castle on the Isle of Skye in northwest Scotland. (You know how partial I am to Scotland.) The castle was first built in the 14th Century, and has developed piecemeal over the centuries. If you’re into genealogy or ancestry, Dunvegan is the seat of Clan MacLeod and the ancestral home of the MacLeod of MacLeod, chief of his clan. Some say it is the oldest continually inhabited castle in Scotland, and if that’s not permanence, I don’t know what is.

I know: stasis—equilibrium, if you will—is a rare commodity these days. Our attention spans are shrinking almost as fast as our insatiable appetite for change is expanding. Permanence is in short supply. More to the point, it’s becoming irrelevant. The world is bent on adaptation and change. After all, if things didn’t change, we’d all still be in the trees peeling bananas.

There was a time in my life when I craved change. Fluidity was exciting, and since time hadn’t yet become an issue for me, I surfed that wave. But no more. Now, I’m perfectly happy with my supper of peas and carrots (read ‘peace and quiet’) while I enjoy the immutable elements of my life: my home, my friends, my family. Oh sure, even these pieces of the puzzle are subject to evolution and change, but at least I retain the illusion that the pace of these life changes is slow enough that I won’t get trampled by them.

It was the French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr who coined the adage, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” (The more things change, the more they stay the same.) I wonder if Monsieur Karr would feel the same these days. It’s not just that the pace of change has accelerated, the scope of change has, too. Change is no longer incremental; it’s leapfrogging everything in its path, and if you don’t believe me, just fiddle with artificial intelligence and explore where we’ll all be ten years from now.

So, call me a dinosaur, but I’m disregarding the meteor that’s heading straight at us, and embracing what permanence I still can. In the wake of the election, I even tried to talk my wife into moving to Scotland, but that dog wouldn’t hunt unless the grandchildren came, too. I understood that, but I did go so far as to search through my photos for something that reassured me that permanence has not gone completely out of fashion, that basic values are not subject to whim, and that there is still a place where I can stand and move this troublesome earth, one small Musing at a time.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. His new novel, “The Tales of Bismuth; Dispatches from Palestine, 1945-1948” explores the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is available on Amazon.