Book of Changes directs no changes

The I Ching was supposed to offer clarity. Instead, it opened a hall of mirrors.

At times, it gave me encouragement:
“Dont give up yet, if theres been 30 years there might easily be 30 years more. Dont forget music.”
It was a rare line of light, a reminder that perhaps life was not yet over, that even at middle age the horizon might still stretch ahead.

But more often, the oracle cut the ground out from under me.
“Muutosten kirja varsin totaablisesti torppasi taiteilijahaaveet: work on what has been spoiled by mother, nothing should be undertaken.”
With a single sentence, the Book of Changes dismissed whole futures, condemned creative ambition as spoiled fruit, insisted that nothing should begin.

How is one supposed to live inside such pronouncements? The book’s voice swings between tenderness and cruelty, between fatherly reassurance and a bureaucrat’s cold stamp of denial.

I began to see it less as prophecy and more as comedy — not the kind that makes you laugh, but the slow absurdity of asking permission from a set of ancient sticks. Every answer came with the weight of finality, and yet none of it settled anything. I still woke the same the next morning, staring at my coffee, wondering what to do.

Perhaps that is the real lesson of the I Ching: not that it dictates a path, but that it exposes the hunger for signs, the compulsion to outsource direction. The Book of Changes directs no changes — it only mirrors the inner drift, the hesitation between endings and beginnings.

And so the question remains open. Whether thirty more years will unfold, or whether nothing should be undertaken. Whether music, or silence. Whether art, or code.

The hexagrams fall, the meanings scatter. I carry on, unresolved.