Mutability is humanity’s dirty secret.

We are not one, the same, predictable, not if we’re using our heads. We vary, as weather varies or the light.

We shrink-wrap our mutability to promote ourselves. Acquaintances slot us for convenience. “What do you write about?” strangers ask. “All sorts of stuff,” I shrug, “the human condition.” I feel their eyes roll.

Mobility is mutability’s nemesis. Before engines carried everybody everywhere, folks mostly stayed home, growing where they were planted. Neighbors knew each other from infancy, their families, events, mishaps; from lifetimes, not glimpses. Thornton Wilder dramatized such long familiarity in Our Town.

Now hardly anybody knows anybody: we’re all too busy. I check in with close friends maybe two or three times a year. Folks relocate, travel, “meet new people.” Our circle of intimates shrinks to our housemates. Even my kids and grandkids I’ll lose sight of if I’m not careful.

The less time we spend together, the freer we are to simplify ourselves to cartoons, which may barely resemble the original. Politicians and celebrities concoct images which they peddle as if they were true. Image consultants urge us to stay “in our lane”: inconsistency will confuse people “who we are.”

Who I am is… I’m not sure. One person one day, another the next, I resent confinement to any “lane.” Yes, I’m Jane’s husband, my grandkids’ Capn, a guy who writes. Some of my truths are permanent (“categorical imperative” was Kant’s fancy term for such convictions). I pray I will always loathe the Nameless One and all he stands for and, with even greater ferocity, love Shakespeare, Bach, and the gang. An explorer, I distrust confident conclusions; an enthusiast, I’m susceptible to passions; a softie, I’m a crybaby; but these are attributes not lane-labels. I love words and you for reading mine.

The bigger the organization, the less mutability is prized. Having slotted folks, we like them to stay put. Many the business that brags about their openness to ideas. Don’t believe it. Any unfamiliar idea interrupts, disrupts, undermines confidence in the status quo. Stick to your lane, fella, if you know what’s good for you – and nod like a dashboard doll.

The head-bobbing lickspittles who surround the Nameless One give me the heebie-jeebies. What worm, I keep wondering, devoured their souls? Mustn’t a real human quiver inside these automatons? Tyrants detest mutability. Don’t think – do as you’re told!

And not just tyrants. Mutability frightens most of us. We want others to be who we expect, not some new incarnation. Zealously we protect our orthodoxies. Driving gets hazardous if folks don’t stick to their lanes!

“A foolish consistency,” intoned Emerson famously,

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedis the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?

Brave words! But then we wonder, Was ever a speaker less mutable than Emerson? He had to be. If Emerson wasn’t “Emerson,” nobody would know who he was.

How much of a person is permanent and how much mutable is a perpetual perplexity. “Till death do us part,” we swear – and mean it – but then things change. I imagine myself utterly different than the young man who began his journey six decades ago, but that can’t be true. Who then?