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You are a transformer. A human being is an entity incarnating in a corporeal primate body continuously transforming through conception through birth, growth, aging, and death. We live in metamorphosis, but it bifurcates into growth or stagnation and decline. As a Dylan lyric puts it, "He who's not busy being born, is busy dying."

Another way we lose sight of our transformative nature is that we succumb to the fallacy that our present state is permanent. We're in a bad mood, and we experience it as though those feelings will continue forever. But even the long-term deficits in our lives are not permanent, even though they may come to feel that way. Think about the most stubbornly permanent-feeling problem area or perceived deficiency in your life. You may feel it extending out around you into the past and the future. That aspect is not permanent either, if only for the most basic fact of human incarnation — our bodies are not permanent. And it is not just your body that is impermanent — no bodies are, not even the bodies of glamorous stars, not even literally celestial bodies like the stars in the night sky. If we wanted a single word that applied to everything in the universe it would be "changing." Changing may be another way of saying alive.

'It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words, 'And this, too, shall pass away.' How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction.'

— Abraham Lincoln, in an address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in 1859

Consider this an auspicious time to embrace transformation and ride the waves of metamorphosis.