EMBRACE CHANGE
You can tend to your busy life later, but from time to time stop and just BE
Make no mistake about it, change is challenging whether it is conscious or unexpected. Viewing adversity as change, not loss or failure, is part of empowered and positive thinking.
Humans develop resiliency through change, both physiologically, and emotionally. It’s necessary for all life forms to evolve. Change comes though many vehicles — some hit us hard, others
are rather sneaky. But despite the challenges change brings, we know it is our natural state — the world grows and we grow with it fueled by our emotions.
We are already designed to cry, express sorrow, frustration, anger, and resentment and most of us choose to explore these feelings. But we are also designed to have hope, recover, be stronger, and inspire others as a result of change. You are never alone because emotion gives us plenty in common — as a society, we are not yet Vulcans. What makes one person triumphantly survive loss and turn it into positive energy, while another in similar circumstances resign? It has to do with our underlying assumptions on change.
I have two very dear friends; each has had a double mastectomy from breast cancer. Losing body parts is devastating, not to mention living with the daily uncertainty of not knowing whether you continue to remain in remission. Yet one woman has forged ahead as a life-force warrior, focusing on triumphs and wins of today. She doesn’t look back.
The other has difficulty moving forward — not engaging in work outside her home, quitting her job, waiting for something to happen while in a state of self-imposed limbo. They’ve processed their information in completely different ways. Why? It’s because people want certainty before they decide to accept change. It’s a natural reaction.
Certainly our culture has become more comfortable with making choices that have predictable outcomes. A current cultural disease we suffer from is predictability, reflected in our inability to accept change at a deeply personal level.
It applies across the board to choices we make with our finances, careers, or our relationships. Science, especially when applied to health issues, has given us a false security blanket when it comes to certainty. After all, it seems we’ve been able to control nature. We like to think we’ve cornered the market on predictability and good planning, when the truth is we live in a time where prediction is more intuition and common sense than science.
To embrace change, we need to release the umbilical cord we think we have to outcomes of certainty. In other words, stepping off of the plateau requires a huge amount of trust. Your fall will be broken somewhere at the right time.
Believing that is what allows us to cope. It is the first step, unsupported by any scientific doctrine. And it’s a big one. No matter what science pronounces, whether it is in the form of a diagnosis or the state of the environment, there is no sure thing. Science has already given us permission to accept truth with a margin of error in just about anything. There is always the possibility something may exist or not exist, despite what patterns indicate.
Truly, it is a useless endeavour to let science hold you back from moving forward. Whether it is health, or other issues surrounding job loss, divorce, or death, you will s u c c e s s f u l ly n av i g at e through change and elevate the quality of your life by knowing anyone can beat the odds.
A l m o s t everyone you know has a story of beating the odds. Let’s pay attention to the real evidence instead of looking for ways to prove that we cannot make it or the odds are just too great. Adopting a new attitude on adversity requires big picture thinking on the subject of change. View life, and spiritual development for that matter, as an upward spiral where you experience some of the same lessons over and over again.
Is it because we just aren’t getting what the lesson is telling us? Perhaps, but that’s not the only reason. We’ve deliberately put those circumstances in our chart in frequent doses to allow ourselves an opportunity to see how we’ve been progressing on the upward part of that growth spiral.
Adversity is an inescapable performance indicator — a frequent reminder of our upcoming 360-degree review in how we handle the bumps. We are meant to be stronger, more insightful each time we get walloped.
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