I have a tattoo of an ouroboros on my right arm just below my shoulder. When people ask me what it means, I often find myself at a bit of a loss, because throughout the ages it has meant so many things to so many different cultures. Its most general meaning is cyclicality; the same set of events occurring over and over. The snake eats its own tail, and having received sustenance, grows, because growth is a byproduct of Life. But because it consumes itself, it also dies. Thus neither state—Life or Death—is fully achieved. Rather a balance is held between the two; one inherent within the other.

However that definition has never really satisfied me. We often repeat, yes. . . especially when we won’t learn from our mistakes. But we don’t always mindlessly repeat, either. We aren’t the same person we were twenty years ago or even ten years ago. We evolve, we change. And that evolution, the change within us, comes at a price. But to me that price isn’t something dark or depressing, or something to be feared. In fact, that price is the very definition of “being.”

As I said earlier, I’ve always struggled with trying to explain to people why that should be so. . . until now. Yesterday I came across an excellent essay by Greta Christina entitled Comforting Thoughts about Death That Have Nothing to Do With God, which was first published in the Skeptical Inquirer in 2005. I thought that what she wrote was beautiful and would like to share her words with you. In particular, what she says about loss being an inherent part of change—and why we wouldn’t choose to have it any other way if we really took the time to think about it—perfectly captures what I believe the symbol of the ouroboros truly represents:

Our existence and experience are dependent on the passing of time and on change. No, not dependent—dependent is too weak a word. Time and change are integral to who we are, the foundation of our consciousness, and its warp and weft as well. I can’t imagine what it would mean to be conscious without passing through time and being aware of it. There may be some form of existence outside time, some plane of being in which change and the passage of time is an illusion, but it certainly isn’t ours.

And inherent in change is loss. The passing of time has loss and death woven into it: each new moment kills the moment before it, and its own death is implied by the moment that comes after. There is no way to exist in the world of change without accepting loss, if only the loss of a moment in time: the way the sky looks right now, the motion of the air, the number of birds in the tree outside your window, the temperature, the placement of your body, the position of the people in the street. It’s inherent in the nature of having moments—you never get to have this exact one again.

And a good thing, too. Because all the things that give life joy and meaning—music, conversation, eating, dancing, playing with children, reading, thinking, making love, all of it–are based on time passing, on change, and on the loss of an infinitude of moments passing through us and then behind us. Without loss and death, we don’t get to have existence. We don’t get to have Shakespeare, or sex, or five-spice chicken, without allowing their existence and our experience of them to come into being and then pass on. We don’t get to listen to Louis Armstrong without letting the E-flat disappear and turn into a G. We don’t get to watch Groundhog Day without letting each frame of it pass in front of us for a twenty-fourth of a second and then move on. We don’t get to walk in the forest without walking by each tree and letting it pass behind us; we don’t even get to stand still in the forest and gaze at one tree for hours without seeing the wind blow off a leaf, a bird break off a twig for its nest, the clouds moving behind it, each manifestation of the tree dying and a new one taking its place.

And we wouldn’t want to have it if we could. The alternative would be time frozen, a single frame of the film, with nothing to precede it and nothing to come after. I don’t think any of us would want that. And if we don’t want that, if instead, we want the world of change, the world of music and talking and sex and whatnot, then it is worth our while to accept, and even love, the loss and the death that make it possible.