Down the rabbit hole

Life is perennially in development. Anything you can name is in some stage of birth, growth, youth, maturity, or death. The life-cycle metaphor is all pervasive, and, really, somewhat overbearing. Is it not possible to have some other unifying idea—one that doesn't depend for its squishy verification on the science of biology? The problem with the developmental paradigm is its predictability and reductiveness. Let's think of life instead as a drop down the rabbit hole, as in Alice in Wonderland. She drinks something and grows very small, eats something and grows to gigantic stature; nothing is predictable about it. There are no "stages of growth," and nothing can be extrapolated from the previous state. I would like to entertain the possibility that that is how life really is: not an ordered series of stages, but a plunge into the unknown. That never ends.