'Change' is the new catch-all word for these times. I'm sure that just about everyone reading this is experiencing or expecting major changes in their life these days. Many of you, like me, have been relieved of their jobs recently. Connecticut ranks third in the uptick of job losses since the economic collapse of last fall and the biotechnology/pharmaceutical industry, which many of you share with me, has been hit particularly hard. Some of you are in the midst of a more blessed change, a new baby arrived or on the way. Many of us are in that famed 'mid-life' roller-coaster of emotions and realizations. In my own home, that will be paired, interestingly enough, with the dawning adolescence of our oldest child. Wow.
Whatever the flavor of change in your life, whether you volunteered for it or it was thrust on you, embracing it is the key. While I learned this early on, due to my father's playfulness with the truth and subsequently being raised on the fruits of Mrs & Mrs Taxpayer ( aka welfare), throughout my life, every time things settle into a comfortable pattern, inevitably colliding with change, I have to learn this lesson all over again.
We moved a bit when I was young; at the beginning of third grade, the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, and then endlessly throughout college and graduate school. I found that I could recreate myself with each new arrival. They were chances to realign who I felt I was inside with how others saw me on the outside. In third grade it was deciding not to be timid anymore, taking more chances. By high school, it was stepping out of my sister's shadow, not being such a follower and ditching the 'bad' crowd who's fast ways seemed to burn them out before the end of high school. Leaving high school for college I decided to stop being the quiet girl whose name nobody knew and then college to graduate school, maybe I did like sports after all. I could go on (as I'm sure you know) but my point is that change is always an opportunity to re-evaluate who we are and how we want to be in this life.
Why then is change, even when we choose it, so unsettling? Because true change is rife with unknowns. Because even the best planned and tightly controlled changes, once set in motion, cause unexpected effects. Because, ultimately, change changes us! And yet so much of our life expects and depends on our consistency. Consistency is only a virtue in the short term. It communicates to others that we are dependable, we can be counted on, we have made a commitment. But it is not necessary that we be 'constant' to be dependable and committed. As the saying goes, 'The only thing that is constant is change.'
How can we 'embrace change' then? Can you remember, when you were young, the thrill of learning something new? Whether it was something in your world, a new place you discovered, or something about yourself, that you could ride a bike, that you could climb to the very top of a tree, there was always a domino effect to learning something new, a series of unexpected effects from this new knowledge. As a kid, secure with the belief that someone was watching out and caring for you, these changes weren't usually threatening. And the consistency demands on us as a kid were likely very small. We were free to enjoy the changes.
Change is inherently not 'good' or 'bad', but it is valuable. 'Bad' changes are usually necessary changes, they are the inevitable changes that can come from not making a voluntary change long before. Because they are necessary, 'bad' changes are often the most valuable. When things are stripped away from us by change, we can see how much of our identity was tied to those things, and how much value they added to our lives. Then we can evaluate whether our previous assumptions about them were valid. Change often breaks our routine and allows us to step outside of time and sort through our life, reclaiming things that had gotten squeezed out, discarding things that don't fit us anymore. Change allows us to discover what we are capable of and who we are at the core. That knowledge is invaluable.
There are a multitude of ways to think about and describe change and how, the degree to which we accept it determines the degree to which it is enjoyed or causes pain in our lives. Two of my favorites follow;
Do you know why, in a car crash involving a drunk driver, it is not unusual for the drunk driver to walk away unharmed? Their mind was impaired in communicating to their body the imminent danger and they didn't tense up. Like a rag doll, the impact of the crash was spread over their whole body meeting no resistance from muscles, attenuated by no fear from the mind. Quite often the pain we experience from change is due to our rigidity, our resistance to it and our fear of it. If we can consciously let ourselves fall into it, accepting the known and unknown aspects of it, trusting in the intrinsic value of it, its impact will be spread out, the sharpness of it softened. The pain and trauma of it can pass more quickly.
Coming from a more positive angle and almost every one's childhood, remember the allure of the swing, the trampoline, downhill on a bike, falling back into the snow to make a snow angel, roller coasters or just the occasional belly-flop hill, spinning around and around, arms opens until you could barely stand... the addictive sweetness of letting go, of the freefall, of being weightless for an instant and just feeling this life, the breath we are drawing in, the wind on our skin, this very moment. Change takes us out of time, however briefly, and roots us in the present. It allows us to let go of our expectations, our preconceptions. It can open us up to new and better possibilities. And it leads to new knowledge about ourselves and our world and that is a blessing.
When change comes, if we can let go of the past and accept not knowing future, we only have the present in all its weightlessness. And only in the present can we appreciate all that we are, all that we have, all that we have the opportunity to become.
Embrace your change. And enjoy the freefall.
Friday, February 13, 2009
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