Change and Acceptance

I’ve always been drawn to change, but resistant to it as well. I suspect this is rather common for most introverts – only you can answer that.  Resisting the unknown became a habit for me at an early age. Throughout my life it was easy to cling to status quo—especially since my status quo looked so much like everyone else’s.

With change comes the unknown, and that can scare the bejeezus out of all of us if we let it. The truth is, you cannot put something in or take something out without everything shifting… and if your life is in a precarious balance then change can threaten to upset your whole house of cards and you can easily imagine everything crashing down around you.

Here’s the deal, rarely do we get a glimpse of what the change brings with it…usually we are asked to accept something without fully knowing what it is that we are embracing … "you want me to do what?" It takes extreme confidence and a leap of faith to accept big change gracefully. Sometimes it takes small steps and a simple willingness to sit with the change until it feels a bit more comfortable.

And here’s another deal: Profound loss brings profound change. There is a hole in our lives where something or someone used to dwell. No amount of filling the void with other distractions will bring our life back to what we once knew and accepted.

Change doesn’t much care what we think of it…it just is. We can get wrapped up in our emotions and kick and scream however much we want to – we can avoid dealing with the change by filling our lives with big and small distractions,  but change happens with or without our blessing.

Yet sometimes our biggest gifts come from a cataclysmic change that chews us up and spits us out. Desperate to feel some normalcy and balance, we wander around in search of any security blanket we can find. We cry, we beg, we curse…but in the end, if we're lucky, we will begin to accept. It’s in the acceptance that we find beauty and grace and often a gift that we feel blessed to have.

And as far as acceptance goes: if you pass up the opportunity to sit through the change and come out the other side called acceptance, fear not for you will have other opportunities to practice. Change is constant: You can pay now or pay later, the choice is ultimately yours and always has been.