While I certainly wouldn’t call myself a change agent, I am more of a change accepter and have eventually learned to just roll with whatever obstacle LIFE tends to throw in front of me. This ‘accepting the necessity of change’ concept goes along with that ‘riding the stream’ theme I’ve written about earlier. You either adapt to unexpected or necessary change in your life or you drive yourself nuts attempting to prevent it from happening. And while some suggested changes might be preventable, others definitely aren’t: like major health changes, relationship changes, or the pending mortality of those you love or even facing your own suddenly-shortened timeline.
The most difficult thing about CHANGE is that it forces you into dissonant and often uncomfortable situations where you must learn new behaviors or learn how to flip your perspective on a situation; OR you must develop your normally unused mental and physical muscles to perform a different task than the one you had been so accustomed to performing.
Major change tends to break or even demolish our habitual learned-behaviors; and as difficult as it might be to accept that this CHANGE is happening to us, it is likely to force us into some completely new situation quite different from the previous or habitual one with which we had felt so comfortable.
Example: There is what we THINK we will do tomorrow or the next day, and then there is TOMORROW that evidently didn’t get the memo on what was supposed to happen that day because all HELL broke out and we ducked for cover because of it.
Major crisis events create major shifts in the collective endeavor as well as the personal one: think Pearl Harbor Day (December 7th, 1941) or the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 (called 9-11). Those two events forced changes no one wanted, but they definitely shifted perspectives on many aspects of our lives and forced major changes world-wide.
Like the Chinese curse: “May your life be interesting” where interesting here means not like usual, it portends a situation that requires you to shift your thinking, your actions, and even your life goals because it might mean that your survival is in question by doing your usual same thing.
But maybe you like USUAL—maybe you liked the sameness, the comfort, the security of performing your usual tasks and meeting the usual people doing their usual things. LIFE in its sameness allowed you to tune out the extraneous noise to some degree. It allowed you to zone out and run on autopilot for awhile. What’s so wrong with that?
Well, if you are zoning out the usual mindless activities all around you, then maybe you aren’t really living. If you are not aware of what you are thinking, saying or doing, are you actively engaged in your life?
CHANGE forces you to reengage, to reassess, to restrategize how to move forward with your life from this day onward.
So is that a GOOD thing or a BAD thing to be suddenly forced to reexamine and redefine your life?
There will likely be short term effects one way or the other, but there will also be longer term advantages and/or disadvantages that will eventually become apparent as well. Some effects you might have predicted to happen and others you could not have foreseen, because it is…well, LIFE; and that’s just how LIFE rolls for most of us. It is always unpredictable to some degree—keeps us on our toes in a sense.
My only suggestion here is to learn to expect change in LIFE in whatever form it presents for you because at least then you will have prepared yourself in some way to be more flexible and adaptive to whatever tomorrow brings, because change is actually a normal state of Earth and species affairs. In other words: CHANGE is just NATURE being natural.
Learn to think of CHANGE as “your invitation to personal evolution.” It’s easier to accept that way. Then think how difficult your ‘tail’ would have made your wearing skinny jeans.
FINDING YOUR TRUTH 