Why do we struggle with change when we know its inevitable? We find solace by being set in our ways, knowing all this while that if we don’t move, the world will quickly leave us behind. Change brings a fresh perspective, and isn’t that the whole point of existence? To continue to expand our understanding of this world? We learn outward and inward. By venturing forth into the unknown, or within into the abyss. We are wiser as we age, and as we witness new experiences, and meet new people, and pick up new skills. And in that worldliness, we find ourselves with grey, thinning hair that bely the years of painful coexistence with uncertainty and a lack of purpose. I wonder often that what will my experience be when I turn 60, 70, 80… the accumulating years will deposit a blob of memories and stories that will either stick for me to tell the tale, or be forgotten soon after in the whirlwind of daily life.
Change is hard for every generation. And despite what it may seem like, the bigger changes stay constant throughout the centuries and millennia. That of finding ourselves a footing in the midst of an uncertain, looming, beautiful, and ponderous world. We talk a lot about the changes brought forth by home computing, by internet, or mobile. or the latest, AI. But these changes pale in comparison with the time–worn coming-of-age stories that we get to witness in our own, peculiar, self-centered way.
You can either renounce the world and choose constant adherence to only what is arrived truth, or you can live amidst the zeitgeist and pick your poison for what constitutes evolving truth versus not.
We are adaptable, and our malleability can surprise even us. If pushed to survival, we can adopt quickly, in theory. So change, in the end, becomes a matter of assigning importance to the event or trigger that catalyzed it and being present and exist in this world. Being present and taking an active interest in the world around you can do more for your changeability than any meditation or guided coaching or self-help could. Describe the tongue of the woodpecker – as Da Vinci would say, to ingrain himself into the thick, noisy, busy, and indifferent nature around us.
I suppose after your have seen more than a handful of decades, you tend to get less surprised by change. And while you get set in your ways, you are hiding a layer of changeability that comes with it and which does not breach your consciousness at all because you stop looking at them as change, and more as a day-to-day living. I wonder if, for some people, change is sort of day-to-day living and they can dance to its tunes like no other. The more change you actively choose, the more it stops becoming a fear, and the more you are prone to participating or instigating a change.
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