It’s Hard to Get Used to Different

Change can be a sudden thing like an event; car crash, death of a loved one, graduation, vacation, etc. Other times change is a slow evolving organic thing moving you from one place or relationship or state of being to the next. Awareness of your self and your life’s journey at least alerts you to the subtle shifts and how you process the changes. Change can be scary. Change can cause stress. Change can affect many aspects of your life. There is an awkwardness to change as well, as you move from one place to the next there’s a time of in between. It is this time of in between when we feel the most ungrounded; you’re not in the job or out of a job, you’re not in a relationship or out of a relationship you’re just floating in between not feeling grounded in one thing or the other, just floating. It’s the floating, the ungroundedness that probably makes people the most stressed out about change, about being stuck in the in between time, because only the Universe really knows what that next thing is. You can apply for 100 jobs and want desperately anyone of them but only the Universe can say any of those jobs was meant to be yours. So in change there is an element of surrender, in yoga we call this Ishvara Pranadhana. And with surrender comes an enormous amount of Faith and Trust that the Universe or God or Buddha or Allah, are all there guiding you and your life. Even if you don’t have a compass even if you’re in a time where you can’t find true North, you can surrender to the great divine and you know wherever you wind up, whoever with and wherever, that you will be okay. It’s like the ages from 11-15 when you’re neither a kid nor an adult and you feel torn between one and the other. Part of you still feels like a kid and part of you really wants to be an adult. But being an adult is kind of scary with so much responsibility. Rebelling against change seems normal because we’ve all been a teenager but we also rebel as adults too. We complain about where we are but as soon as we have something new we complain about how different it is from what we had. Are we ever satisfied?

Here it is September again; back to school is a harbinger of change and the end of summer. I remember being a kid when realizing it was the end of summer vacation in those last weeks of August. The anxiety would slowly build up as that first day of school approached. Change like that when you’re talking about going back to school, that for me was the ultimate in between time. I can still feel it, because my own schedule changes and a totally different day to day life unfolds come September. We must learn to Surrender with Faith to this in between time and embrace different. The alternative is to be stressed and anxious which will only lead to wrong turns. Instead recognize that the road ahead is not always visible through the fog of the great Unknown but Trust that it will reveal itself when the time is right. The Universe doesn’t work by a calendar or any set schedule. The Universe works in an organic karmic flow of energy ~ It’s time to hit the ocean my friends; it’s time to float into different.