Change is all around us
Sunrise to Sunset – another day
Season to Season – another year
Birth to infancy to adulthood and death – another life
Change is within us. Change is around us. Change is part of life.
Life compels us to engage with the new, moment by moment. How we respond to change will dictate whether we engage with it, plan with it and grow; or resist, stagnate and get stuck.
I am always struck how we encourage our little ones to walk, talk and grow in independence.
No sooner have they mastered these steps, than we start putting limits on their exploring, their independent thinking and their world.
As parents and caregivers we need to put appropriate boundaries in place for their safety, however, if we invite our children to be curious, to test their theories and to learn through experience, taste new foods, mix different colours of paint, move furniture around in their bedroom to see how it fits, looks and feels to them, we are encouraging them to embrace change through discovery.
This experiential learning of change within their young lives, helps them to prepare for bigger changes in life, such as moving up a class, changing schools, moving home, making new friends, trying new activities.
If we, the adults in their lives are rigid, require everything to be the same every day, with no flexibility, our world becomes smaller and our children may feel restricted, restrained and rebel or comply and retreat.
The fundamental key to being able to navigate change is our attitude.
Do we lean into it with curiosity or turn our back on it in denial and resist?
This has really come home to me recently in a couple of ways:
As empty nesters, we have a huge family home and garden, filled with family memories (looking to the past, from the present). As much as we enjoy the space, its full of maintenance tasks and costs that are not necessary for just the two of us….so over the period of about eighteen months, we grappled with idea of change and then put our house on the market and now about to downsize to a smaller home. Was it all plane sailing? No. Lots of discussions, looking at pros and cons of staying or moving.
Fundamentally we had to:
- engage with the idea of change in our heads,
- get some new tangible information about what was possible,
- start to imagine living somewhere new.
- take action steps :- putting our home on the market; searching for a new home
- finalise choices
- do it!
Now we have a new focus, a new energy moving towards a new environment, a new space to arrange and call home a new season in our lives is about to begin.
“All things are difficult before they are easy.” — Thomas Fuller
Some changes are thrust upon us, some changes we have choices about, some we don’t.
If you are feeling stuck, wanting change, but fearful of change