Marilyn Gustin

Here are some more thoughts about change:

If we look around at folks, we see that attitudes toward change are quite varied. Some of us like it lot—only we don’t call it change, we call it adventure. Those among us who climb high mountains in challenging conditions, those who set out toward a dream when they have not a clue about how it could happen, those who find current circumstances to be choking and set out to free themselves, those who simply enjoy novelty—there are many of us. You may be one.

I believe that viewing life as an adventure is our natural way to be. Consider small children. For them, everything is fascinating. They are natural explorers, natural adventurers. They want to touch, taste, hold, chase, build, destroy, try out everything. They are eagerly looking for learning, for newness, for experience. That’s our human nature showing up.

Like much of the innate wisdom we have as little ones, this love of exploration and adventure often gets trampled out of us, perhaps with good parental intentions, in the interests of safety.

But we can recover the delights of adventure in our every day, especially when change is afoot. It’s a matter of attitude. You and I can choose our attitude toward anything and everything. We know of many people who embrace whatever happens to them, seek meaning in it, grow from it, give thanks for it. We also know of people who resist everything, don’t like it, find problems in it, get depressed over it—whatever “it” is.

The quality of our attitude will be the quality of our experience.

I once met a woman who’d been through a series of pretty hard things: the aunt who raised her had died, then her lover had been killed in an accident, then her finances had a serious downturn, and then her beloved home—with years of antique collections in it—had burned to the ground. All that had happened in a three-month period. I met her just six weeks after the fire. She was radiant! So I asked her how her radiance could possibly have come about.

“Well,” she said, “a teacher of mine listened to my list of events, looked deep into my eyes, and asked me a question: ‘Is it the end of everything? Or the beginning of everything new?’ And I realized I had a choice. So I chose to see it all as a new beginning—and though I sometimes feel pain, I am filled with joy at the opportunities before me now.”

Can we do the same with the changes in our own lives? Of course we can! We can re-awaken what we knew as infants: that every “this” is a new adventure and we can treat it just that way.

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Tags: Adventure, change, children seek change, making peace with change, relax a little, simple curiosity

This entry was posted on Friday, February 12th, 2010 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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