happy new year

One thing leads to another seems to be the Buddhist philosophy of karma. I have heard a Buddhist definition of reality – it is the fabricating of what has dependently arisen. So Tibetans understand subjectivity, where people see what is real to them ‘from their own side’. No doubt the Chinese have a different perception. So what is real is not inherently independently real, as we tend to think: what we can say is real is a relationship, which is changing and impermanent.

I don’t pretend to understand all of this. But I want to find a way of describing what I don’t understand in words that I can understand – so getting away for Buddhist language of ‘emptiness of self’ or ‘no self’

I am thinking this as we come to the end of the year. A child soon learns on his birthday that he is not really a year older suddenly and January 1st will not be markedly different from the day before. But these virtual boundaries are useful to us in appreciating both continuity and discontinuity in life. We are the same and not the same – all the time.

I am interested in the phrase – ‘things are constantly changing’. It sounds contradictory. I want to be pedantic and say, what you really mean is – continuously changing. But perhaps you mean what you say, after all.
Happy new year.
Or, as a Buddhist might say, may all living creatures be at ease in the new year.