Brain Food #861: The freedom to change

The changing appearance of the trees in the transition of the seasons leads to thoughts on new beginnings, the act of shedding and changing while remaining the same. New leaves grow on the same branches, the old ones gone forever; is the tree still unchanged?

In cold climates, one of the main reasons deciduous trees survive is only because they shed their leaves, as a means of adapting to their environment. Had the trees refused to let go of the leaves, they would eventually be gone with them.

In his timeless speech on personal renewal, John W. Gardner described the act of perpetual change and our personal evolution while travelling through life as “an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves.”

Irish poet William Butler Yeats was known to be open to change, and often revised his lyrics as part of his own evolution as a writer and person. For Yeats, renewal was as inevitable as the connection between who we are and what we make, even if that would often mean being misunderstood:

“The friends that have I do it wrong
Whenever I remake a song,
Should know what issue is at stake:
It is myself that I remake.”

Other times, change is uninvited, even unintended. Laurie Anderson, a multidisciplinary artist, initially trained in violin and sculpting. Despite her identity being shaped around performance art, she skyrocketed to fame with an electronic music song, ‘O Superman.’ To those close to her, this shift and unexpected success was a borderline betrayal: “I was a performance artist with no interest in the pop world. When the song went to No. 2, my friends said I’d sold out.” Unplanned change, or even small experiments, can redirect our paths in surprising and meaningful ways.

Still, amidst this freedom to change and to evolve, we do not always need to throw the scraps away. Marina Abramović, perhaps the most renowned performance artist in the world, found her way into art through painting. In an interview with the New York Times, she recalls how, as a young artist, she was fascinated by car crashes, which she also liked to paint:

“Though I wasn’t aware of it [until recently], this crash represents the energy that I’d create in my

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