Everything changes. We may not be ready for it, we may resist it, condemn it, despise it,.....but change................is constant. Sometimes it is visible, expected, assumed, guaranteed, necessary, but the times when change is sudden and unexpected, tend to unsettle us. We even include random unexpected events in our lives, and insurance companies among others, do well from us doing so. Change is part of life and no one escapes it. If this is so, why do us humans find change so difficult to deal with? We should really be quite used to it since from the minute we rushed down the birth canal and took our first breath, we began our journey towards our inevitable change; death. We all have many different views on what happens when we die and since as far as I know, nobody has been able to die and then tell the story, I will leave the dying and concentrate on the living part. Living, includes many changes....and nature is a splendid teacher and artist extraordinaire, displaying for us the many amazing, beautiful, raw, energising, rejuvenating, honest and sometimes brutal aspects of change. We cannot prevent change, regardless of our attitude towards it, it will happen, what we can do however is to decide how we will deal with changes, big or small, incremental or detrimental.
A friend sent me a postcard and wrote: "Wherever you are, be there" and for the longest time this sentence puzzled me. Of course I would be where I was, what did it mean?
For the last 20 odd years I have suffered with bad back pain and at one time the pain was so intense that the doctor prescribed such strong pain medication that although it alleviated most of the pain, the downside was that it also disconnected me from my awareness of space and time. I basically had no sense of "reality".....I was there, yet I wasn't. This was very unnerving for me so I decided that I rather take the pain than loose my sense of reality and discontinued using the medication. Was there another option available that didn't include me becoming a zombie? Yes, breathe through it. Breathe through it? Seemed way too simple, could it possibly work? Fortunately for me, a kind person with years of experience with pain was willing to teach me how. It was simple; don't resist the pain, breathe through it. Just focus on the breath, in and out,...in.......fill the lungs, out...exhale noisily all the air.......focus......only on the breathing.
I was flabbergasted......it really worked.
In order to really be where we are, we can't be somewhere else in our minds. But with pain management, seemingly we purposely remove our self from experiencing the pain, to experience another aspect of our living bodies, ie; taking one breath after the other, with life in every breath.
Pain has the power to bring us to our knees, to make us slow down, to grab our attention, to force us to listen, and often pain demands of us to change. Some say: "Pain is a teacher, Joy is a friend".
Once when we experience pain, we try to find ways of eliminating it, or at least lessen it, so often the first line of defence is brace ourselves against whatever is causing it. We grit our teeth, we stiffen our bodies, we try to ignore it, we pretend we don't feel it, and so forth, maybe we even do a bit of self-medicating to deal with it, until the pain becomes unbearable and we have to face it.
"Only a fool repeats a behaviour expecting a different outcome" someone said, but I think there are many times in our lives when we do just that. Change at times may appear scarier and more threatening than the pain we know and have become used to, so we keep doing what doesn't work but at least feels familiar.
Do you always sleep on the same side of the bed, do you always sit at the same place at the table, do you always use the same toothpaste, soap, laundry detergent? Do you always watch the same shows on TV, always get the petrol at the same gas station, always have pizza on Friday nights?
Do you always respond the same way to strangers looking strange, people dressed all in black with nose rings, people with foreign accents, kids on skateboards, and old people?
Change. Think differently. Behave differently. Ask yourself if there is a different view, response, you may entertain?
Change in itself is neither good nor bad, positive or negative, its how it is interpreted that makes it so.
Often we measure change by the impact it has on those connected with it. We do have a choice in how we view changes in our lives, we also have a choice in how we will respond to those changes, which is to me good news. History shows how many changes are resisted in the beginning only to become humdrum, everyday state of affairs: the combustion engine, the telephone, the electric light bulb, the computer, the www, the laser discs, etc.etc. Not to mention all the advances continuously fraught in the arenas of the sciences, medicine and pharmaceuticals.
"Change your thoughts, and you change the world" Norman Vincent Peale said.
"Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts", wrote Arnold Bennett.
Stephen Hawking: "Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change".
"The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails" William Arthur Ward.
Wherever you are, be there, in mind and body, and whatever you cannot change, accept with serenity; whatever you can change be courageous and deal with it; and pray for wisdom and insight to know the difference.
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