Change

Williamsburg...Brooklyn, NY

My neighborhood is currently dealing with the overall transition of Boston from an environmentally conservative college town to an international city. The outflow of considerable wealth from the center of the city into fringe neighborhoods like Roxbury, Mission Hill, South Boston and my own Dorchester is drastically changing these neighborhoods. Change has been changing these neighborhoods over the past two centuries, despite the perception that Boston has a stable architectural or social history. 

The human yearning for stasis is a product of cognition. We know that time waits for none of us. Fact of life. So, by trying to control our environments, we are trying to control time and change. For example, there is what I call Williamsburg (Virginia) Syndrome: A romanticizing and imitation of eighteenth century architecture and design. Building a four-car garage to look like a Williamsburg brick barn at great expense in a suburb hundreds of miles away from that historic theme park is a symptom of the syndrome. While I am fond of eighteenth century American architecture, I am also fond of running water and indoor toilets. 

Historic preservation makes more sense in a society which controls its growth conscientiously. America has never been this kind of place. After all, it began with wiping native civilizations, developed over thousands of years, off the face of the landscape. The occasional historic neighborhoods in older cities are simply quaint shells, housing the chic interiors of the wealthy. More about property values and hereditary provenance than historic accuracy.

A basic element of any personal practice for health and growth is the acknowledgment of change as a fact of daily life. This usually develops with the personal acknowledgment of inevitable mortality. Once the aging and deterioration of the body is accepted as a natural process, a person is liberated from obstinate nostalgia physically and environmentally. The true consciousness of limited time makes nostalgia seem like a waste of time. Embracing change and struggling with its sometimes painful results brings strength, endurance and wisdom. Avoiding change, trying to obstruct its inevitable tide, is like living in a sandcastle at the ocean's edge and expecting things to always remain the same.