"I can't believe it's Monday"
"It's been a year already?"
"where has time gone?" "It's scary how different the world is now."
"I can't even recognize him anymore"
"You promised we would stay the same"
Why is it so hard to fathom change?
We are so deep in our denials towards the only constant in the world as we know it. As yet another dynamic spectrum of life on this ever-changing universe, there is nothing stagnant about us. Not when it comes to our bodies; cells being removed and replaced constantly nor our souls, experiences changing how we think, behave and perceive life. The resistance we exert towards inevitable shifts and twists that characterize life is rather consuming. Why do we fear it so much?
Why is it that we sweat to prevent it, especially if we perceive it with as loss of some sort? We frown upon it when we see it in others. Habitually complementing a loved one for 'never changing' and it makes me wonder if it's rather an insult. I get it, It's said in the context of someone who has always been there for you or just there in your good book, you wish they never let you down nor contribute towards the erasure of their names from it.
Unwelcoming unpredictable change in others stems from the same ego that does it's best to prevent change in us ourselves. The ego thrives in identities and the perception of control. The longer you identify with the descriptions of you and your life as you like to present it to the world, the happier and in-control the ego seems to grow. In the same breath, it can't help but crave to construct boxes of description for others as a tool for it's need to hold people and things constant wherever it feels they meet it's demands. If it spoke, it would be somewhat like this; "By any means be all I want for me, at all times. Nothing different and no one I have to get to know again, stay the way I have always noted and approved of you."
Sounds like a rather childish request doesn't it?
We also hold ourselves steeped in the yoke of the need to remain. We each have been raised with sets of belief systems about everything life and taught by individuals who probably were terrified of change themselves. Subjugation of our dreams disallowed to manifest, our best versions kept as potentials by inertia of all kinds. Careers, friendships, relationships, diets, ways of understanding and connecting to the unseen; the list goes on. Just like the ones before us who showed us , beyond a shadow of doubt, how it's supposed to all be done we seem to carry on pre-determined paths. Change for what? Right?
This compulsive desire is so deep seated that you may be reading this, acknowledging the profound reality of the fear of change in yourself an STILL resent this blog post because it just might stir up a rebel in you and boy oh no you can't be that! Life is good just as it is, predictably stable and familiarly good with hints of great here and there. Terrible does dare knock on your door ( how dare it?! ) and you know it will walk right through weather you willfully let it in or not but you still resist it anyway. You know the career you have spent years building may pay the bills but leaves your soul hungry for more life lived on your terms but you resist that too. It's the norm to despise Mondays anyway.
It's only us, by the way. The rest of creation encompassed by the very same universe welcomes and embraces change or is simply indifferent to it. No bear undergoes depression whilst heading into hibernation or torpor. No tree despises life whilst shedding it's beautiful leaves, swaying to waves of strong winds or adapting it's growth in search of food and light. No humpback whale deliberates over it's migration and if the demand of the journey is worth the reward this season, or ever. Change is a crucial part of survival in the natural world and therefore instinctually embraced. Us humans have somehow convinced ourselves we are the exceptions. That's just so humanbeingy. (rolls eyes) It's clear to see that by resisting it, we have made ourselves miserable.
See we have evolved this organ we hold in a bony skull on top of our bodies. It set us apart from the rest of creation and somewhere along the way, it convinced us that what it produces is all that it matters. I'm not talking about the hormone from the Pituitary that stimulates your Thyroid glands but the thoughts that discourage change whenever the ego, another product of the thinking brain, deems it 'uncomfortable' and therefore avoids or otherwise resists it. Far more than we feel our existence and realize our oneness with the rest of the universe including our very nature to be susceptible to change, we prefer to think our existence away having created an ego that would rather control any variable or die trying. Die literally, die figuratively. Change whose timing and duration we can not predict, change we are unable to safely pilot and one we are helpless to prevent if we so desire is an unseen enemy that's keeping most of us in shells of fear.
Who would you be if you weren't afraid of change? What would you allow your friends, lovers, spouses or children embrace about themselves if you dared to allow them to startle you with the 'different' you dread? Who would you forgive for disappointing you? Which loss you still suffer from would you finally let go of? Who would you be if you approached a certain unknown with curious embrace?