When I was four years old my father was an itinerant evangelist. My parents and I traveled all around the country holding revivals in Pentecostal and Evangelical churches. My Dad would preach and all of us would sing. City to city, church to church, state to state, bed to bed - we were always on the move. One night after a church service a nice lady asked me about my home. I answered her that I did not have a home. As a result of my parents over hearing this conversation, my Dad very quickly decided to get off the road and once again serve as a full time pastor. While my parents' intentions were to plant themselves so that I would have a sense of home - circumstances still dictated that between kindergarten and seventh grade I changed schools seven times. I am not complaining about any this. As a matter of fact, I am grateful. The fluid life of my childhood created a psychological structure that would anchor itself with internal things rather than externals. My sense of home was not a literal place, or building, or location - not a physical thing or object. My sense of home was metaphysical. The physical things changed often in my young life. Yet my psychological structure was held together by unchanging "constants" that were not tangible.
There are minds, much more intelligent than mine, that claim time travel is, in theory, plausible; it's just that we have not developed the technology to pull it off. The folk that think about these kinds of things suggest that if a person was going to travel back and forth between different time continuums it would be necessary for them to keep a "constant" (something or someone that would be a constant reference point or anchor regardless of which particular time continuum the person might be in at any particular time). Without a "constant" present in all time continuums it would be impossible for the time traveler to maintain their psychological structure. Without a "constant" the time traveler would psychologically break down. By the way, this idea was the subject of an awarding winning episode of the TV series "Lost". While none of us (that we know of) are time travelers, life, however, is filled with many changes. My life has been recreated many times over. The objects that surround me have changed over and over again. If it had not been for my "constants" I'm sure my psychological structure might have gotten rickety. Even at a very young age I had developed a sense of my "constants". Even when I did not know a physical home, I had an awareness of things internally that anchored me psychologically and were my home. Seven schools could not shake me away from my "constants". Being fired, defrocked, and excommunicated from the religious tradition of my youth could not shake my "constants". My "constants" are friends that have always been there regardless of changing objects and circumstances. Relationships, houses, people, and settings have changed. My psychological ability to survive through the varied changes was possible, I think, because my "constants" provided continuity in spite of the many changes.
My "constants" are more internal as a result of my childhood (and what they are is personal to me). Your "constants" may be more physical or a mixture of the two - a house, a school, a church, a person, a song, a book, The Beatles, it could be anything. My point is, regardless of what your "constants" are, it is crucial to be aware of, to honor, to befriend, to even romance the "constants" that keep you who you are even in the midst of a very changing world. Your sanity depends on it.
Some of life's greatest moments are the moments we uncover a new "constant". However, they are not actually "new" - they have always been there holding us together - we had just not recognized them yet.
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