Change happens.
And it happens all the time. Everything in this universe is in constant motion, is constantly evolving, exchanges particles with its environment in a constant swirling and shifting pattern. Even at the core of a diamond, which is supposed to last forever, the electrons rotate around the core at 800 meters per second. And even they exchange with their environment, constantly changing what was into what is and what is becoming.
Many people fear change. In part this is due to the way we learned to perceive reality as children. When we learn to assign grunts and later symbols to what we perceive as apparently coherent objects around us, we begin to think in terms of entities. From ‘mommy’ to the ‘sun’ the world begins to unfold in nouns. And we consider ourselves a noun. A subject. A coherent thing that is – and with that, we remove and deny the element of change.
I seem to be a verb
― Buckminster Fuller
Bucky got it right. When he investigated his sense of self, he realized that thinking of yourself as a verb is much more realistic than to consider yourself a noun. Not just does everything change, each one of us changes – all the time. Thinking of yourself as a verb means you are realizing that you are constant action and activity. Your heart is beating, your blood is pumping, emotions waver in an out, neurons fire, thoughts come and go.
“I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
While we gradually change and evolve in every moment, there are also those times, when a quantum leap is required, when we are tasked with shifting to a completely new operating system. Think back to yourself in elementary school, then high school, maybe college. Very different versions of you. At 7, at 14, at 21. Massively different versions of you. These were not only steadily evolved. Key moments, key experiences forced you to become someone new.
Those are points of transformation. When you leave behind a whole old way of operating and take on a new operating system. It’s the rings in a tree that show years gone by, the markers that made us who we are. And they require a moment of death.
Gradual change from point A to point B happens all the time, but a quantum leap from point A to point B requires “death” in point A and being born anew in point B.
“I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be.”
― Albert Einstein
This death experience can be frightening. But it is only so if we attach to the idea of ourself as an entity, as a job title, as a static being. Then we will fight change, we will resist transformation – only to delay the inevitable. Sooner or later we will be presented with a situation that invites us to transform, to let go of who we thought we were only to find out who we can become.
So, embrace death. Die often, die well. Accept that there is nothing to hold on to. That yesterday’s you is so yesterday in comparison with who you are today, which in turn pales in light of who you could become tomorrow.
Shifting to this perspective allows you to continue to see this life as an adventure instead of a threat to who you think you are. Life will become more open, different opportunities will arise, and you will have the option of evolving faster.
Allow yourself to die today, just a little…