We’re always changing. It doesn’t matter how hard you try to avoid it, or what you do to run from it, change is always coming.
You can hide out in a cabin in the woods, off the grid, with no contact, and while it might look like you have avoided change, it’s still happening out in that world around you. In your cells, in the world, in the lives of those around you.
It’s always coming for you.
The older I get, the more I’m craving change. No matter if you make the outside world perfect, there’s always going to be things in the inner world that will throw you, and last time I checked the outer world is nowhere near perfect, and it isn’t getting any closer to it.
Yet I see more and more that could change within me, and could change in the outer world.
Fluid, moving, and inescapable.
It doesn’t matter how desperately you try to anchor yourself in the moment, the current is always going to wash you. You can stagnate against the changes if you so desire, trying to find a moment of stability in your supposed peace of the moment, but time itself is moving under, within and above you.
You can no more hold into the moment as you can stop the tide from coming in.
Time has waves and seasons, and you are a part of all of it.
The more you grasp for things to stay the same, the more you will lose day after day. The art of living is to surf the changes, finding your balance not in one spot within the ocean, but in the movement of the water as it rolls inexorably onto the next beach the next cloud, the next ocean.
The water moves within its function, both an element of chaos and a bringer of life, balancing destruction and divinity, deep and abiding.
But if everything changes, what is permanent to hold into?
The answer is the same as it’s always been – you. Even though you change, you are the one constant within all the stories in which you partake. No matter what happens, your consciousness, your ability to experience yourself and the world around you is the only constant.
When you begin to focus your moment and awareness into yourself, you’ll realize that you can surf the changes of time and the universe in a way that allows you to always know where and who you are.
In that knowledge, even when becomes irrelevant.
Because you can begin to live with the knowledge that you are, and you are here within yourself. Time then becomes unnecessary, because now becomes yesterday, today and forever.
You choose to experience that which brings you peace, unwilling to spend your now in a way that is incongruent with who you know yourself to be.
Peace in this moment, wisdom in the next.
And the funny thing is, the pathway is there for any of us, if we will but choose to walk it.
Becoming one with yourself, finding calm and serenity in wherever you find yourself, is not the purview of the gifted, but the possible destination of the state of consciousness we deign to call human.
Difficult, but possible; hard won but worthwhile.
You can walk there with you next thought, your next decision, your next pathway.
You just have to see it and choose.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings