This Mutable and Immutable Life

The word “mutable”means that which is “liable to change.”  Whatever else we can say about Life we can certainly say it is mutable. Can anyone deny this?  One day everything is going smoothly; the next day everything is falling apart.  One day success; the next day utter failure. Life is mutable as the weather is mutable—it is ever changing, fluctuating, shifting, unpredictable, uncertain, inconsistent, and erratic. 

There is also in Life that which is unchanging or immutable.  Someone has said that if you can’t change it, it’s immutable.  Death is immutable.  We can delay it and try to avoid it, but we can’t change it. It is inevitable. A common saying is that taxes are an immutable part of life.  Immutable implies that something is fixed, established, permanent, and changeless.   The seasons come and go.  We can’t turn fall into summer, or winter into spring.  We cannot return to the years of our youth. We may try to hide our age—dyeing our hair, applying some kind of wrinkle cream, or getting a facelift, but we cannot change our age.  Some things in life are mutable (ever changing) and some things are immutable (unchangeable).

American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer speaks to this mutable and immutable life of ours.  

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can, 

And the wisdom to know the difference.

The last line of the prayer is as important as the first two—“And the wisdom to know the difference.”  There are those who say that the only constant in life is change (mutability).  This is not true  Some things are immutable.  We have all kinds of words, like “everlasting,” or “eternal” to signify that some things are changeless and forever.

What is liable to change?  What is changeless/eternal/everlasting?  I think I’ll try making a list of that which can and cannot be changed so I can gain the wisdom necessary to know the difference between the   mutable and the immutable.