Things Change

Things don’t stay the same. They change. Relationships like roads end. The curtain comes down. The audience go home. We live our lives with a temporary family, sometimes for a little while, sometimes for many years. Often when rehearsing a play, we grow close to others in the company, but before long, we leave as quickly as we came and our little family is no more.

Good things happen, bad things happen, but overall they change.

Some things are not designed to be permanent. A favourite quote on this comes from C S Lewis, he said: “It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”

In a book of Taoist philosophy, it says that we should be grateful for the times our rails run together, they will eventually separate and run their own paths to new destinations.

It is the nature of things to change and nothing lasts forever. Holding on creates a greater pain than letting go. Letting go is the healthier, yet the harder of the two.

The reason for the change is largely irrelevant. You cannot argue with the seasons, the weather, the direction of the road. It is what it is. This apt quote from recently departed psychologist Nathaniel Branden: “The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.”

Or from Shakespeare, spoken by Hamlet about being prepared for what comes your way.

“There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all.”

The readiness is all. Things change, and the readiness is all.