Life is about change. I get it. I might not always like it, but I’ve always tried to embrace it because it’s about learning to close doors and open new ones. Each season we travel through offers us likes and dislikes, just as the weather seasons might bring us some things we like and other things we don’t like.
I noticed late afternoon yesterday as I was swimming how the light is beginning to change. The sun feels more golden, the days a bit shorter (how quickly we lose that hour of light we had gained by the start of summer), and the air just a little cooler in the mornings.
While I embrace a bit cooler, I’m already dreading how quickly fall might really come because we never know year to year when it will arrive. It’s like waiting for someone who is driving to visit- you don’t quite know how fast they drive, how much traffic they encountered, or if they had to travel through any construction.
And there has been so much other change in our big collective world that has dripped down into our own worlds. I find myself wondering if there has been that much change or if I’m just old enough to see my younger days as a little big more nostalgic. I really do miss the landline among other things. The simplicity that my parents always talked about, the simplicity of their youth that they didn’t see in what look like our much more complicated lives as I grew up, now feels simple compared to what I see today.
There are good things– there are always good things, things I’m grateful have changed. And yet I still find myself feeling sad for things that have been lost and wondering what I do with the memories that I don’t want to lose.
I always say we have opportunities no matter what’s happening to us and this is no exception. The hard part is being open to those opportunities that might not make sense, at least when they come to us. And finding comfort in the discomfort of change we don’t want to see.
Yet change has always come, at least four times a year as we spin around on our axis. We’ve always been prepared for it. Now we need to use those lessons we’ve been taught our entire lives.