Most of us are not big fans of change. Whether or not we recognize them, changes are always happening. We change our clothes, we change our sheets, we change our minds, we change our likes and dislikes. Sometimes we change our friends. We redecorate our homes. Things that we used to like lose their appeal while things that we didn’t like seem more attractive.
Whatever changes we make, it takes some getting used to and that takes time. Often, resistance shows up before we reach acceptance. Some years back, I had a duvet cover that had seen better days. It had stains and rips and it was time to get a new one. My boyfriend, James, and I went to Bed, Bath & Beyond and looked over the goods. There were a great variety of duvet covers and I was enjoying going through them. James was not. He looked nervous and each one I showed him, he said he didn’t like it. It became obvious that he wouldn’t like anything so amid his protests, I made an
executive decision and chose one that pleased me.
When we got home, I took off the old cover. I was relieved to get rid of it. I picked up the new one and started slipping it on. “Come here and help me,” I said.
James looked anxious. He walked over and picked up the other side.
“This isn’t going to work,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I said. “It fits perfectly.”
“We need to go back to the old one,” he said.
I asked him to step aside while I finished doing it. I tried to be kind to him because a small lovely change for me was a large distasteful one for him. You can only imagine what it was like when we had to move from a house we were renting into a different one.
When we try to avoid change, we are stopping ourselves from evolving. Frank Herbert, American Science Fiction author, said: “Without change, something sleeps inside us and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”
It takes a lot of inner work to invite change and be optimistic about what’s coming next. Our minds seem to magnetically play worst case scenarios. That’s how it works. But if we pay enough attention and stay mindful, we can release the fear and focus on the gift that change brings us.
I had a friend and mentor who was working as a facialist in a fancy spa in Palm Desert. She was there for a few years until someone new bought the spa and fired everyone. I was with her as she cleared
out her treatment room. We were driving to her house nearby and she looked upbeat and calm.
“Aren’t you upset that they fired you?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. “It isn’t personal. Something better is coming.”
She was so clear about that, I believed it was true and it was. She ended up buying a spa hotel with eight room rooms and its own hot springs. Her living space was much larger than it had been in her last house and she was happy.
That was a rare reaction. I didn’t know how she could do it. It took a lot of trust and courage to face the unknown with a positive outlook and it worked out better than she could have imagined. I’m not
implying that all change is good. Sometimes it isn’t so good. Sometimes it feels like a painful shedding of our skin but dreading and feeling like a victim doesn’t help. When we choose acceptance as our goal, when we choose deep breathing over rigidity, things become tolerable and the future seems hopeful.
In our world, winter turns into spring. Light turns into darkness. When I was a child, my father took me to an open field early in the morning to see an eclipse of the sun. The sun was just rising above the
horizon, starting to project light, until all of a sudden, the sky became dark. I looked upward in awe as the darkness dissolved and the sun began to shine once again. It was pure magic to me. I try to remember that when something is shifting. And it does. Hardship becomes ease and ease becomes hardship and it’s an exercise in futility to try to hold on to either one. No matter how hard we fight it or how much we try to capture a moment, nothing stays the same in this world in which we live. But we can take comfort in the fact that whatever changes we make, our hearts will stay the same.
Pema Chodron says,
When we resist change, it’s called suffering.
When we can completely let go and not struggle against it,
That’s called enlightenment.
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