Things Change
Things change.
One of the biggest challenges that we have as people is coping with change and the bigger the attachment to the thing, situation or person, the more one suffers to cope with the change when it happens.
We build these seemingly indestructible castles around every aspect of our lives and in the end, they never last. Bit by bit they crumble away and we suffer every step of the way. This seems to be the natural way to respond, mourning the loss, until we have significantly healed only to repeat the process over and over, until we are finally forced to face the biggest un known change of them all, our own mortality.
A short excerpt on developing spirit and resilience from my book “Stand Tall.”
But before you begin to think too much about it, non-attachment in no way means that you give up caring and loving. You can still feel the same way and release the bondage of ingrained habitual ways of thinking that pre-determine our behaviour in times of loss.
One of the biggest hurdles to overcome is our expectation of how someone should act or behave in a particular situation, which causes suffering when they do not act in a way that is congruent with our own thoughts and behaviour. The beginning of mastery starts when the effects of meditation begin to show in how you react to change. For example, when running a business with many moving parts, the best made plans can change in the blink of an eye. Being calm and quickly planning an alternative in times of stress is an acceptance that things change. If you are hanging on and complaining about the problem, getting angry and frustrated, you need to go back to basics and to take note of this blog post.
Change is a constant and we can rely on change to happen all the time. Why should we be surprised as even the most solid so called situations crumble in front of us. The wall between east and west Berlin, eventually crumbled to end the cold war. This was a seemingly indestructible barrier both physically and mentally yet like all empires it ended.
Change can be as simple as losing your favourite sun glasses, or putting a ding in the side of your new car, or your preferred barista having the morning off, life is change. In all of these daily happenings, you can easily blow up, or enter the river of flow and let go of the cause of the loss and quickly move on to working a solution. Making this aware change in your life will ease your self inflicted suffering and unhappiness. You can create a new, calm and enlightened demeanour, unruffled by the machinations of constant change.
Accepting the idea that change causes suffering and then allowing all change to just wash over you as you choose, takes practise. The important thing to remember is, and this may seem simple, is that once something has happened the result is generally out of our hands, and no amount of emotional resistance can change it.