O Fortuna

Found in yesterday’s fortune cookie:

Change can hurt, but it leads a path to something better.

"Change can hurt" Gee-duh, RILLY? And oh please!

Even good, positive change hurts. I launch myself into life's little transmog thrill ride but I'm kicking and screaming the whole way. Change doesn’t always lead to something better (another gee-duh RILLY moment just for you. Yur welcome) It's like hitting the tables at Foxwoods and that’s why I fear it.

If the Chinese cookie sophists wanna write about change, and not piss me off (because, of course, this is ALL about ME), they could just crib from Heraclitus, Seneca or even my boy Parmenides. Like zo:

We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not.

(yes, I feel quite certain that the Wachowskis read them some Heraclitus)
and

… we step into and out of the river as different beings.

Who will I be when I get to the other side of this grief? No, I don’t expect that my heart will ever stop aching BUT I do know that some morph action will result from walking this rough path. It's unavoidable and shit.

Parmenides claimed that change is an illusion – everything's part of an unchanging whole. Change is an illusion.

Gosh, I'm feeling all Matrix-y again.

We can speak and think only of what exists. And what exists is uncreated and imperishable for it is whole and unchanging and complete. It was not or nor shall be different since it is now, all at once, one and continuous.

Hard to fit that on one little slip of paper and stuff it inside a cookie, I suppose.

My fave is Seneca:

Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.

Yeah, I must be Superwoman squared now, eh.

...it is more civilized to make fun of life than to bewail it.

Which is why Bast gave us Jon Stewart. Of course,

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.

Yup. Truth.

And there's the pragmatism of Dylan:

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.
~ Bob Dylan – The Times They Are A Changin'

I imagine this won’t fit within one of those 2”x.5” bits of paper either. What we need, clearly, is a bigger cookie.

Of course, I could just read some fucking philosophy books.

Nah, pass the Do-si-dos, plz.
O Fortuna – Carl Orff