Feeling contemplative recently, a few thoughts occurred to me. One of those thoughts being that change is never comfortable.

There is a certain comfort in a garden that never changes. We like the idea of things staying exactly as we found them — the same trellises, the same shade, the same predictable rows. It feels like a form of protection, a way to keep the world at a manageable distance.

But nature has a sharp way of reminding us that “static” is not the same thing as “safe.”

Take the vine, for example. A vine’s entire purpose is to reach, to climb, and eventually to offer something up.

If it decides the wind is too cold or the sun is too bright, it might stop growing. It stays on the trellis, tucked away in an insulated corner, away from the elements. But a vine that refuses to change with the seasons doesn’t just stay young forever. It begins to shrivel.

It becomes “wood-bound,” turning brittle and bitter until it can no longer produce anything at all. It dies on the vine, not because of a storm, but because it was too afraid of the harvest.

We often do the same thing in our own lives and our own communities. We build bubbles. We convince ourselves that if we can just keep the outside world from leaking in, we can preserve a moment in time forever. We treat our traditions like museum pieces under glass — pretty to look at, but cold to the touch.

There is an old Sufi story about a king beetle who lived on a vast estate. He spent his life trying to understand the nature of a great light he saw in the distance. He sent scouts to look at it, and they came back with reports of its glow and its heat.

But the king realized that reporting on the light wasn’t the same as knowing it. He angrily slammed down his fist and said, “I asked you to tell me not what it feels like, but what it is.”

To truly understand what that fire was, he had to be willing to leave the safety of his estate and fly into it. He chose to be consumed by the thing he was drawn to, rather than withering away in the dark.

It’s a radical thought, that we might be better off “utterly changed into fire” than slowly turning to dust in a vacuum of our own making. Change is inevitable, but it can burn. It burns away the parts of us we’ve grown comfortable with. But it’s also the thing that provides warmth.

If we spend all our energy trying to keep the match from being struck, we shouldn’t be surprised when we find ourselves sitting in the cold. Maybe the risk of the flame is better than the certainty of the rot.