Welcoming Change

 Change and the Resistance to Change

What is change? Why do some of us resist it?The theme of change in the current political campaign has gotten me to thinking about how human beings are separated by their attitudes toward change itself. I sit firmly in the welcome change camp but it was not always so. For years I resisted change. Only a lot of pain and suffering made me, finally, clamor for change. Something had to be better on the other side. And it has been better, a gazillion times better. But that’s me. Maybe it’s not that way for everybody.

An Idea Whose Time Has Come

So here I am, living life now from a place called embrace change and the world is exciting and full of possibilities. This is a fantastic time to be alive. I’m dreaming up the possibility of a world without war, where humans actually decide to give up armed violence simply because it’s unworkable for the world. That’s far out! It turns me on. I may be in a minority who sees this possibility but I have no doubt that the world will get this vision one day. It’s only a matter of time. The world decided to end slavery and it came to pass. You cannot stop an idea whose time has come.

We Don’t Like Uninvited Change

You can however, resist an idea mightily. Why do that? People like their established patterns of behavior. We like things to be the same. We like our families to be the same, our workplaces, communities, places of worship, lifestyles, politics and our ways of communicating. We want to do things the way we’ve always done them. Even if we were complaining and criticizing each other all the while! This is called tradition.

We don’t like it when our traditional ways of living are ripped away from us by spasmodic societal changes. I believe that much of the political polarization in the US can be traced to the cultural upheavals that happened in the 1960’s and 1970’s: civil rights movement, women’s movement, gay rights and others. These changes erupted into peoples’ lives and a small town American way of life disappeared forever.

Honoring the Good Parts of the Past

What to do with change? Hate it? Fight it? Yet how many of us would go back to life without a computer? Or a TV without a remote? We like these technological innovations. It ’s the changes in how we deal with the new people who show up in our lives and start dating our sons and daughters that our so disconcerting. How do we learn to be with these new others and ultimately, to love them?

It comes down to honoring the good parts of the past and to telling the truth about what didn’t work back then. How many truly happy marriages and how many thriving families existed in the past? How many children grew up without the spectre of war or nuclear annihilation or terrorism hanging over their heads? Perhaps we could deliberately create a new future in which vast new possibilities, many as yet undreamed of, will emerge.