"Nothing, absolutely nothing, remains just what it is. For Buddhists, the most basic fact or quality of the world is not being, as it is for most Western philosophers and theologians: it’s becoming. To be is to become, one can “be” only if one is in motion. (We can note an immediate difference here from what we heard about the Christian God: for Western, Christian theologians, to call God perfect means he doesn’t change; for Buddhists, if we call God perfect, it means that God is the most changeable reality we could imagine!)
But just why is everything impermanent and in constant change? The answer has to do with what might be called the flip-side of anicca: pratityasamutpada, or, technically, “interdependent origination.” More simply: everything changes because everything is interrelated. Everything comes into being and continues in being through and with something else. Nothing, Buddha came to see, has its own existence. In fact, when he wanted to describe the human self, or the self/identity of anything, the term he used was anatta, which means literally no-self… We are not “selves” in the sense of individual, separate, independent “things.” Rather, we are constantly changing because we are constantly interrelating (or being interrelated)."
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