Factions are natural. I’ve fought them all of my life and now I realize it’s like fighting the need to eat. Cells divide. Children grow up and leave home and develop their own families. Students leave the school and start their business. We break off into our own small groups as natural as we breathe air every day.

It takes a village. A small one is best. To grow and be strong we need exposure to variety. But constant variety is too stressful. We need some redundancy. If some type of normal isn’t established we can’t develop patterns and patterns are our foundation for growth. If I don’t take the I-44 highway to work everyday, I don’t know how long it will take to go to work. If I don’t have some way to calculate the time I need to leave for work, how do I know what time to wake up?  My routine is the same every work day. The alarm goes off. I hit snooze. It rings again and I get up and make my coffee and grab my lunch for later that day. I shower, dry my hair, apply my make up, and get dressed. It takes the same amount of time everyday. My morning routine allows me the time to sleep in just a bit longer. Redundancy.

It’s natural, all the cycles of growth, destruction, division. Nothing is meant for permanence. How often I forget that. Life changes and grows much like the kaleidoscope we played with as kids. I remember thinking as a kid how pretty they were. I’d pick one that was my favorite then it would change and the new one would be my favorite. They were all pretty. I couldn’t pick one. And sometimes that is painful. If you couldn’t choose one job or one house or even one spouse, you’d always be darting around like a mad person. You’d never develop a lasting relationship. Life would be shallow.

As much as redundancy gives me freedom to grow, I also know that change is the nature of the game. Nothing stays the same forever, not even death, but that’s a subject for another post.

Nature doesn’t recognize good and evil, Philip. Nature only recognizes balance and imbalance.  Walternate, Fringe

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