The Inevitability of Change
Change is a word, a verb, that defines generations.
We’ve called it evolution, awakening, rebuilding, and many other words. It's one of those things that feel inevitable because it is. Change happens whether you are conscious or not. It's not a place or space that happens and waits for you. It happens whether you’re ready or not. Everything changes at every moment even when we’re not paying attention. It's always in the small or big things but change will happen.
When I’ve spoken or thought of change, I’ve thought of the marketed version of it. The version that includes positivity, renewal, freedom of sorts, and progress; a brighter better you. The version that comes in gym progress photos and ‘how I became a millionaire in 100 days.’ Most marketers only care to sell the product and gain profit while some may care about their clients, the people. So, they package these deals and you’re hooked fully believing this is for the best but is it? Next year, you’re in the same place making the same resolutions only this time, you’re further back than when you started. Somehow, you’ve managed to change but not how you wanted to.
You’re caught in this state of change that feels like failure, feels like a letdown, feels like “nothing’s changed”; or that’s what most people say. But something has changed and that’s why I say change is inevitable. In the little ways we interact every single day, we make choices. We choose who to smile at, wave at, have a conversation with, hug or block. That in itself is change. When you wake up and choose to read a page of the book you’ve been telling yourself you’ll read for the past month, that’s change. When you finally get up and visit your grandma after ignoring her calls for the past week, that’s change. But all this change is conscious. You’re making decisions towards being this person or I’d like to think you are.
But take a turn around and think of the unconscious changes that happen in people’s lives or rather, your own. We’ve all noticed the influence that friends, family, and acquaintances have on us. Whether we admit it or not, they are the greatest catalysts for change in our lives.
If you’re not someone that constantly reminds yourself to operate from a space of self-awareness and intentionality, you may become a person you don’t recognize but accept because of the people around you.
The inevitability of change is in the ways someone becomes the proclaimed therapist of the friend group because they listen to everyone’s problems but never voice their own. It’s in carrying on with destructive behaviors for years but changing friend groups every two years because “they just don’t get me”. It’s seeing your friends or family progress in different areas of your life while you seem to be stuck in this one area. It can be waking up one day 10 years from now and knowing you’re in a life that has nothing to do with your influence.
Change can also happen to someone’s life in a positively viewed light but that may not be the case for the person its happening to.
Change can be different things for different people. It can work with you. Change is not always in our control but we can be aware of it and work with it. I’m not writing this to cause an alarm of any sort but to highlight; change is inevitable, how is it happening to you?