Luke Rhinehart is the author of cult classic The Dice Man.”I wrote the book to free myself (and others) from the patterns and pressures of society that force humans into deeply unsatisfying ruts,” he says. Today we print the following meditation on the flow of life. “This little prose piece is one of dozens I’ve written to try to capture the healthy flow of life. Why a piece suddenly flows out when it does seems to me to always be a mystery.”

THERE IS NOTHING you have to do.

There is nowhere you have to go.

There is no one you have to be.

Roll on.

The sun rises in the morning whether you want it to or not.

The sun sets in the evening no matter how you feel about it.

Sometimes it rains. Your opinion on the matter is not of relevance.

Sometimes some one dies. Every second some one dies. Your grief or rage do not produce a resurrection.

Your car fails to start. Engines do not respond to obscenities.

You have discovered your soul-mate. The universe yawns.

The President of the United States does something particularly thoughtless, stupid and unwise. The bad state of your digestion does not change the President’s mind.

After hours or years of effort you win the big race or big promotion. A few days later you wonder why people aren’t still congratulating you.

The wind veers to blow directly into your face and your progress is slowed. Fortunately you are already wherever you are.

Your hair is a mess. What a welcome change.

You met someone important to you and know that you made a terrific impression. Too bad. Now you will have to live up to that impression for the rest of your life.

You met someone important to you and know that you made a horrible impression. Good. You can try something different next time.

You feel that no one pays any attention to you. You don’t know how lucky you are. If only people would stop paying attention, we could let go and be whoever we feel at any moment like being. But when we notice someone paying attention then we have to narrow our act to perform for that someone. The role we might really have wanted to play gets stuffed in the costume trunk.

The earth is round. No matter how straight a line we take sooner or later we end up not far from where we started.

A straight line is the best way to travel between two points, and the worst way to travel through life.

Were men to fulfill our recent tendencies and blow up the world and destroy all but fragments of our most advanced civilizations, what would be lost? Would any more be lost than was lost when Rome fell, or the Incan Empire, or the dinosaurs became extinct?

We think that our science or our art or our literature have achieved something that must be eternal, but would the universe be any the less without the knowledge of atomic power, a polio vaccine, penicillin? The universe evolves and for every disease we hinder or destroy, the universe blissfully creates ten more. Is mankind better for nuclear power, the internet, the cell phone, satellite television? Would mankind be better off if all were destroyed and forgotten and began all over again? We don’t know, but we do feel it is an open question.

Great art and literature? How many living human beings have read or seen MEDEA and loved it? Ten thousand years from now human beings will probably have changed so drastically that WAR AND PEACE will be as alien to them as is much great literature of the past to most contemporary humans.

All we do is build mole hills that we imagine are mountains. The first strong wind will blow away all that we thought was eternal.

Nothing lasts. Thank the Buddha, nothing lasts. All life is cursed and blessed by this simple truth. Nothing lasts. The paradox humans struggle to close their eyes to is that if anything were eternal it would be unimportant. Only change is interesting. Life is all change. The man I am at the beginning of this sentence has changed forever before I type the period to end it.

And we thank God it is so. Nothing lasts. Change is all. Humans write thousands of books to celebrate the eternal, and their lies usually hurt more than help those who read them.

Celebrate change because change is life.

But humans fight change and thus fight life. Most human misery lies in the effort to preserve something—someone’s love, wealth, a new sofa, a child’s charm, a talent that is fading. Let them go, let them go. Every effort to preserve something blocks the arrival of something new that might enrich life.

We dream of a perfect life and thus miss the perfection of life.

There is nothing you have to do.

There is nowhere you have to go.

There is no one you have to be.

Roll on.

ENDS