Change in the Unknown

Recently I was asked if people could change. Certainly, I thought. I’ve changed this sentence structure to place the subject into anonymity; a passive construction that most people wouldn’t pick up on or think was intentional. It’s a trick of the tongue, or a game of I Spy I once played with a three year old, “I spy with my little eye, something that is tricky.”

What he was looking at, well, your guess is as good as mine.

You see, the thing about change is that it happens all the time. We ebb and flow as we move through our minds. What makes us unique from the beast is our ability to see it, to feel it, to be it. We don’t have to seek change, we just become it, so it’s curious that so many people run from it or towards it as though that motion of running, as evolutionary as it is, is something we can take control of. Haruki Murakami once wrote that the greater the rush, the more care one should take with the job while Chögyam Trungpa wrote that to be a warrior is to learn to be genuine in every moment of your life. Not to omit women from the equation, Lee Maracle explains that the old people tell us to look at what they’re saying because the face shifts and changes imperceptibly with each change in thought, our stories surface imperceptibly and yet society tells us to mask it away, and so we convey it through tone and it comes out in song.

That kid was correct- change is tricky, so is learning to see with every system that connects to your optic nerve and allows you to see correct; see without judgment or interpretation. Without bias or assumption.

Change is about how we breathe. How we wake up, go to sleep. To some extent perhaps true change doesn’t come from changing your spots, but from how many ways you are able to perceive them. To approach a situation from multiple angles simultaneously. In approaching change then we look at the process and not the outcome and are able to glean so much more than we could have possibly thought to source from the unknown. Not why we are what we are, or why we do what we do, but how we learn to live genuinely, creating patterns for ourselves that are flexible in responsiveness, adaptable in their approach, and overall just a lot of fun because sometimes change isn’t; sometimes change sucks, but dwelling on that doesn’t make it go away and perhaps it isn’t acceptance or choice, but simply definition that allows us to shift from change to transformation without having to explain.