Wear Change Well: It Looks Great on Everybody!

“Just take my hand and make me glad I’m changing.”
Guillemots, I Don’t Feel Amazing Now

I’m not sure anyone can make us feel glad that we’re changing-- aside from ourselves. We have to start thinking, accepting and believing that change is good for us on every level at every moment of every day. And most of us don’t want to do this. We’re fearful. Change means facing unfamiliar waters. It doesn’t feel safe and so we resist. We don’t wear change well because we like to rest in the comfort of stability.

And yet change is a constant fact of life. We are actually powerless over change for the most part; and when we do try to control it, we ensure our own misery, because it’s impossible to stop life from changing.

So let’s look at change this way. Change ensures that life is forever new, that we are always able to grow into fresh opportunities, into higher levels of understanding, intelligence, emotional maturity, spiritual enlightenment and physical fortitude. Change also ensures that we are ever-evolving in the fulfillment of loving well—and allowing ourselves to be loved well.

Growing pains are part of the process, but they are only intolerable if we offer resistance. Instead of fighting changes in our lives, we need to flow with them. Instead of closing off our minds and hearts to new challenges, we need to open up fully to the mystery and fulfillment they offer in the same way a flower opens its petals to the sun. Sure, the sun can scorch the flower, but it also provides tremendous nourishment for the growth and life of the flower.

Greet change with a smile and an open mind. Be open to the belief that change is for your benefit. Look at the bigger picture of life and realize that change is essential to your ever-evolving journey from newborn to child; from child to young adult; from young adult to adult; and from adult to full maturity. It’s also the genesis that eventually takes you to the highest level of perfection any being can attain as you expand beyond this world and into the next.

Believe change is always for your benefit; believe in your abilities to grow with life each day; and joyfully flow into the newness of each day, into the newness of you. You may need a helping hand during your growing process. That’s OK. No one grows into individual fulfillment all by themselves. So reach for that hand, embrace its warmth and understand that personal growth is shared for the benefit of all.


(Guillemots is a British Indie band, led by Fyfe Dangerfield. "I Don't Feel Amazing Now" is from their 2011 album Walk the River.)

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