Transitions
“Time
changes everything except something within us which is always
surprised by change.”
Thomas
Hardy
I
have been thinking a lot lately about the changes that time brings.
So many of us are in transitional places. My friend, Renae, and I
discussed it just last week. Transitions occur constantly regardless
of life stage—childhood to teen, teen to young adult; age to age,
they keep on coming. Some changes are huge, like birthing our first
child, and some are ordinary, like finishing a big project and
experiencing that gap before the next one comes along. Whatever the
change, transitions are uncomfortable places to be and for that reason, we avoid, resist and delay; we try our very best to put them
off.
It
seems in life we transition from darkness to light, and back again,
through joy and sorrow, good times and bad. Some of us are
conditioned to expect the bad times to such a degree that we have
difficulty enjoying the good. We stand in the middle of contentment
waiting for the other shoe to drop. In fact, we may defy full out
happiness simply because we anticipate the movement to its opposite.
It's only a matter of time, we say. We are surprised by love, by
loss, by joy. by grief. Something in us cannot roll with it; cannot
accept it, and so we resist.
Nathaniel
Hawthorne said, “Time flies over us but leaves its shadow behind.”
Once we move beyond whatever transition overtakes us, we are changed.
We are no longer a child, no longer young, no longer middle-aged.
Sometimes, we grieve that loss; sometimes we dig in our heels and
refuse to transition out of it. We humans are complex creatures.
The
life lesson here seems to be one of trust—of letting go through
each inevitable change, and allowing the stream of life to flow
through us, to carry us on its current. That way we experience first
hand each stage, each milestone along the way, rather than spending
all our precious time and energy holding back the river.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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