The world has changed.

Not a lie, strictly speaking, but no less misleading than one.

My first contact with the technical death metal band Nile was in a CD Exchange somewhere in San Antonio (I think the one on San Pedro). I came across their album Those Whom the Gods Detest and immediately expected I had found a new favorite.

I was wrong.

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Everything pointed to my falling in love with Nile at first sight; brutally intricate death metal, a musical and lyrical fixation on Ancient Egypt, absurdly cool song titles (lookin’ at you, “Papyrus Containing the Spell to Preserve its Possessor from He Who is in the Water“). I just couldn’t get into them. It was infuriating; I wanted to like this band. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something about the music – even as my brain rejected it – that still called to me. I was haunted.

I set them aside, never abandoning the hope that one day I would develop this evidently acquired taste, and life went on.

A few months later, I endured my first break up. This was followed by a tumultuous last semester of college, followed by moving back to San Antonio (from College Station), followed by my first job out of college, first solo apartment, and the complete demise of the religious worldview with which I had been raised.

Ya know, garden variety life went on. 

Of course, life went on after that as well. I met the girl of my dreams, moved with her into a dinky little Shasta trailer in Austin, published my first book, and witnessed my country descend into a political miasma I had never seen before.

Somewhere, amidst these personal and national upheavals, I found my taste for the music of Nile. I don’t know what held me back before, or what exactly had changed. Then again, that past tense-thinking was the problem. I hadn’t changed: I was changing, I am changing.

The more I thought about it, the more I felt deceived by this seeming truism. Yes, the world has changed – but that’s always been the case; and we have always been changing as part of it. The more I fixated on states of having changed, as opposed to eternally changing, the more I found myself blindsided by the basic motions of reality. This might seem like semantic back-flips for their own sake, but it’s these subtle shifts in thinking that often have the furthest-reaching consequences.

Ultimately, this is why Nile’s music haunted me, reeling me back in over and over until it all clicked.

Thousands of years ago, the Egyptian civilization was unparalleled in scope and scale. Pharaohs rose and fell, some of them leaving indelible marks on the land over which they ruled, ensuring their memory would outlast their world.

Life went on.

Then, on a continent the Ancient Egyptians didn’t even know about, a world away, a group of middle-aged Americans erected their own monument to the glories of Ancient Egypt. In place of wood and stone, they crafted with sound and savage fury. Pharaohs who took their last breath eons before lived again in the chaotic symphony of down-tuned guitars, guttural roaring and clockwork drums. Ramses II could not have begun to conceive of a song like “User Maat Re,” yet this does not show how the world changed – rather how it is changing and always will be. I find this both terrifying and exhilarating.

More to the point, I find comfort in learning to navigate this mercurial existence with the aid of middle-aged Americans playing furious death metal. The music is frantic and often unpredictable, mirroring the impermanence of life in a way I find profoundly compelling. The history lessons embedded in the lyrics don’t hurt, either.

Ultimately, change is a permanent state of affairs, and I owe Nile a huge debt of gratitude for providing the means by which I’ve learned to accept that.

I think the more we emphasize that subtle semantic shift, from changed to changing, the better equipped we will be to meet the challenges of the future.