Maybe Rip van Winkle didn’t sleep for 20 years. Maybe it just felt that way, for him and a lot of other people.

Washington Irving wrote that classic story in 1819, a time of rapid change in America. But he set it a few years earlier, and had Rip sleep through the American Revolution. When he emerged from his nap in the Catskills, he was astonished to find how much everything had changed; for anyone who’d been gone for a while, the “new America” must have seemed like a strange dream.

The idea wasn’t all Irving’s, of course. He drew on centuries of traditional tales about people who slept for years – decades, sometimes – to find a changed world upon awakening.

Together they express a common theme in the human experience. We tend to be uncomfortable with change, often preferring an unpleasant present to the unknown.

Nevertheless, the future always comes at us faster than expected. Sometimes its speed just shows up the hollowness of whatever system has been overturned, like the collapse of Russia’s Romanov dynasty in 1917. Just six years before, Czar Nicholas II had celebrated his family’s 300th anniversary in power, and saw no reason it shouldn’t continue forever.

Signs of that decay were hidden, even to those who were looking for them. Just weeks before the Russian Revolution, Lenin was writing that the Romanovs would endure for years. But he took his chance when he saw it.

Sometimes, however, change is a matter of perception rather than reality. We’ve all heard repeatedly that on Sept. 11, 2001, “the world changed. Everything changed.”

Well, not really. Osama bin Laden hated us just as much on Sept. 10 as he did Sept. 12. Terrorism was nothing new; England had endured decades of IRA bombs, and France had many years’ experience of the same from right-wing and left-wing over its colonization of Algeria. The same could be said of any number of countries. We just woke up to how things have been in the rest of the world for a very long time.

Yet no matter how good or bad any situation is, it won’t last forever. One of the main concepts in Buddhism is impermanence, stressing that everything – every situation and institution, not just every individual – will eventually pass away.

That’s not necessarily a depressing idea, as noted by someone Gaylon Ferguson quotes in the essay collection “Mindful Politics.” In talking about Buddhist hopes for political change, Ferguson’s friend, Al, points out that when Rosa Parks refused to get up from her bus seat, no one could have predicted the energy that would soon be unleashed to fuel the Civil Rights movement, and the relative speed with which that changed America; laws and attitudes which had endured for 400 years retreated rapidly in less than two decades. Who would have believed that the Berlin Wall would collapse without bloodshed, Al asked. Yet it happened four years after Mikhail Gorbachev took over, and only two years before the Soviet Union just … disappeared.

The next big societal shift, I think, is under way, even if its outcome is not entirely clear. We’re now talking about gay rights in ways that would have been unbelievable to a Rip van Winkle from 1988. Then, would a serious public debate on the legality of same-sex marriage have been possible? Asked then, even gay rights activists would probably have put that many more years down the road.

Change is always more rapid in the political world anyway, with unpredictability being the only predictable factor. How many candidates for office have we seen go from “serious momentum” one week to self-destruction the next? And that doesn’t change once an office is secured – it’s never secure. Look how quickly Eliot Spitzer, crusading governor of New York, was tripped by a large bank transaction and his tryst with a Girl Gone Wild.

Though in – I hope – very different ways, Bowling Green faces big changes, too. The area’s population is still rising rapidly and becoming more diverse, and I think each step in those directions accelerates the next step. Whatever comes out of downtown redevelopment plans, it’s certain to be very different from the city center that we’ve known for the last few decades, and the impact of the nationwide economic downturn has yet to fully break here.

On the other hand, some expected changes don’t come off, no matter how much we may try to make them happen or believe they will. Remember all the flap less than a decade ago over “Y2K?” Jetliners would fall from the sky, antibiotics would disappear, our utility bills would all be inaccurate, the biblical End Times were upon us and only an army of overweight accountants in Rambo gear would save us from the radioactive hordes. Somehow I slept through all of that.

While some may have been disappointed at the world’s failure to end, I imagine that on the whole feelings were mixed. Thus far, not one prophecy of The End Of Everything has come to pass. If one did, I missed it.

But who knows what’s next? Anyone expecting to see change coming might heed the words of Gen. John Sedgwick. Commanding Union troops at the battle of Spotsylvania Court House, he climbed atop a trench to peer out at distant Confederate lines. He reassured his nervous aides. “Don’t worry,” Sedgwick said.

“They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist -.”