All of those things - rock and men and river - resisted change, resisted the coming as they did the going. Hood warmed and rose slowly, breaking open the plain, and cooled slowly over the plain it buried. The nature of things is resistance to change, while the nature of process is resistance to stasis, yet things and process are one, and the line from inorganic to organic and back is uninterrupted and unbroken. William Least HeatMoon
About This Quote

This quote from Ernest G. Born was written in 1949 and is a good example of the use of the idea of resistance to change. Born was an American Abstract Expressionist Painter, but he also spent time studying Zen Buddhism, and Buddhism influenced his work. This particular quote comes from a book of poetry called “The White Tower” and if you read it all the way through you can see how this concept is interwoven into the poem.

The idea that nature resists change and that we should not be surprised that we cannot change things we do not understand or appreciate is very interesting. When we try and force something to change it only causes conflict and resistance, and we should instead accept things as they are.

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More Quotes By William Least HeatMoon
  1. The light that filled my house was deep and livid, half magnolia, half rainwater. Things sat in it, dark and very still.
  2. When I was an undergraduate we were told that history had ended, and we all believed it. When the Berlin Wall fell, what history was made of was over. No more Cold War. No more wars. And yet here it was, and is and all...
  3. On the Ridgeway path, aged nine or ten, was where for the first time I realized the power a person might feel by aligning themselves to deep history. Only much later did I understand these intimations of history had their own, darker, history. The chalk...
  4. Being a novice is safe. When you are learning how to do something, you do not have to worry about whether or not you are good at it. But when you have done something, have learned how to do it, you are not safe any...
  5. The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world.
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