Something Needs To Change...5

Yesterday, a colleague told me that change is inevitable, growth is optional. Interesting perspective, and I think very true. I also think that whatever changes in our environment or in our life circumstances is also going to change us. Even those of us who remain diehard resistant to change are still changing under the impact. Not necessarily growing, and in such circumstances we run the danger of gravely damaging our soul. No one is doing themselves or anyone else a favour by resisting change. And when we do, we are not safeguarding the old and traditional, as we like to delude ourselves into believing. We are, rather, turning the old experience, the old way into a caricature of itself, and we by extension become its attendant caricatures. The novelty and beauty of the new experience can not be preserved as in alcohol or formaldehyde. It is already dead and useless. And we also do this to ourselves. Does anyone ever pay attention to celebrities (usually women) who go under the knife? They want to stay, or at least appear, eternally young and beautiful, but at best they come out looking like one of Madame Tussaud's waxworks, and at their worst like an alien trying to disguise itself as a human. No one is being fooled. This does not mean that we don't value the old, the traditional and the familiar. Nor is their anything wrong with cherishing fond memories. There are also ways of adapting the old to conform to the new. And how we end up doing that is going to be a creative act. Constant change can also leave us feeling unmoored and unsupported. This can be frightening, especially to those who have been spoiled by chronic stability. We tend to make idols of the familiar. Especially if your life has been particularly privileged and safe. There is an illusion about safety, since the world, the universe is not a safe place. Yet we need safety, or an illusion of safety if we are going to do well and thrive. So, we create stability and with that the familiar and a sense of safety. This is the function of culture and traditions. But if we stay in this bubble zone of security then we aren't going to grow. There is something about the unknown and the dangerous that makes us grow and move forward. If we can survive it. Some are more fragile than others, and cannot handle change, sudden or otherwise. How do we address this, and how do we offer support while ourselves moving forward? I wonder if the real dynamic isn't in change itself, which can also become a fetish, but in that state of tension and flux between change and stability. We are always having to negotiate and I think that is an essential corollary to our growth. It isn't in change itself, which is only inevitable, but how we harness the forces of change to work in the best possible way for all of us. This is rather different from the classic Darwinist position of survival of the fitness through natural selection. Change is best negotiated through love. Those who want to move forward the most and the fastest need to slow down in order to accommodate those they are leaving behind. Those who cannot keep up with change need to learn to accept change not as a threat, but as a boon and an opportunity. We always need to find and put in motion new ways of caring for one another, and that is perhaps the most important change we can ever work within.