7/31/2019 #4 Thriving on Change
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Change is difficult, scary, tough.
Change is life!
Change always implies movement from whatwas to what is, and from
what is to what will be.Everything in the physical universe
changes, in-cluding human beings. The human embryo be-comes an
infant, the infant a child, the child anadolescent, the adolescent
a teenager, the teenag-er a young adult, the young adult grows old
andeventually leaves our universe and enters intoanother dimension.
Everyone and everything thatis part of our physical universe is
subject tochange! What never changes is not part of our
material universe. The cause of change can beinternal or
external, it can come from within orfrom without. Change is often
difficult, scary,
and tough.
Consider yourself. When you woke up this morn-ing and greeted or
cursed the new day, you re-gained consciousness. That is change
because
while you slept you were not in an awakenedconscious state. Or
take as another example yourcoming to the end of your college
career. Whatyou studied gave you information you did not
previously have. You experienced intellectual
change (and perhaps some heartaches and head-aches along the
way). You are not only moreknowledgeable but also older by four,
five or six
years. That also is change.
Change is endemic to everyone and everythingthat can be measured
physically, chronologicallyor spatially. People change. You change.
Fromthe moment of your conception you began theaging process, you
began drawing closer andcloser, day by day and hour by hour, to the
end of
your earthly life, your death. This is change. Per-sons are
never finished products. We ourselvescan be the major agents of
change as regards our
own lives! Yes, there are things that can cause
some external changes in us but external changecaused by
illness, old age, violence or injustice
does not imply a change in who we are essentially.Mary will
always be Mary and Jim will always be
Jim despite notable changes. You and most nor-mal persons can
take charge of the direction inwhich most changes in your external
life are tak-
ing you; moreover, no one can ever take awayfrom you who you are
essentially. Nonetheless,drugs, extreme fear, violence, a profound
hunger
for social acceptance or the cultivation of religiousvalues can
turn you into what society mistakenlycalls a different person. That
different person isnot who you are: you are a human being, a
personwith a past that ties you to the Creator or creative
principle responsible for you having life and adestiny, a raison
dtre.
Change can be downhill or uphill, positive or neg-ative.
Tadpoles do become frogs and acorns oaktrees. Illiterate persons
have learned to read andwrite. Great sinners have become great
saints. Allthis is change and, as you can see, change impliesthat
something or someone is in process, is be-
coming. At the end of the process you have a new
creation, the end product of change, of evolution.
Since change implies that you are becoming whatyou now are not,
you have the possibility of beingthe truly dominant force as
regards the direction inwhich you are evolving. There are choices
thatyou have to make and if you decide not to choose,
that becomes the choice you make. You can throwup your hands and
say theres nothing you can doabout the change that is occurring or
will come, oryou can say that the change is not going to affectwho
you are deep down. If you choose the second
option it signals that you are not giving up on
yourself, although you cannot control what is hap-pening in your
life at the moment. If on the con-
trary you choose to hand over yourself and your
future to external forces of change, those forcesof change will
manipulate you as though you
were their puppet.
Either of the choices you make implies change
for the better or for the worse. Take for examplea graduate
student at the university who is pursu-
ing an M.A. degree and who desperately wantsto avoid facing life
as an unmarried woman. Shemeets someone who is attracted to her.
She dates
him for some months and in her ingenuity sheeventually permits
their relationship to includeintimate sexual encounters. She
becomes preg-nant. She now must decide whether she shouldkeep the
child or give it up for adoption. Shemust decide if she should
marry the father of theinfant she has been carrying for two or
threemonths or remain unmarried. She now has tomake changes in her
life that she never consid-ered. Nothing will ever again be the
same forher! In whatever direction her thinking, her feel-ings and
her choices take her change is involved.With greater determination
than ever before shemay defend her inner resolve to be who she
sees
herself as being. She may determine, for exam-ple, to complete
her M.A. requirements no mat-ter what sacrifices she has to make.
On the other
hand she may throw up her hands and sink intothe quicksand of
depression permitting her cir-
cumstances to determine the changes that will
seriously affect her self-image, and her future.
Changes that occur in life can be mental, emo-tional, moral,
social, physical or spiritual. More-over, a change can be permanent
or temporary.A social change in the life of the
aforementionedgraduate student can occur as she accepts and
affirms her motherhood. Her social life and her
relationship with her parents and siblings willchange for the
better or for the worse. Emotional
Change implies that something or someone is in process, is
becoming ...
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changes will in part be conditioned by how oth-ers respond to
her pregnancy. She may end uphaving less control over her
sentiments and feel-ings becoming more easily defensive or
broughtto tears by some incident that occurs or someword spoken. On
the other hand she may rejoice
in the knowledge that she is well on the way to
becoming a mother. Mentally, as she begins toconsider the
advisability of raising her child her-
self she is acknowledging her need to changeand see life
differently. A change in her moral
outlook may bring her to reconsider the advisa-bility of
maintaining her relationship with thefather of her child and the
values or lack thereof
that brought her to her present reality. Physical-ly, she may
experience some physical pain ordifficulty, frequent bouts of
morning sicknessand hunger or loss of appetite. All these
changes
may be experienced at the same time. Some ofthe changes she is
experiencing will be tempo-
rary while others will be permanent.
Possible permanent changes include a preferencefor this rather
than that, red rather than yellow,apples rather than oranges, prose
rather than po-etry, arts rather than sciences, this person
ratherthan that person, taking religion seriously ratherthan being
indifferent, etc. These very same
changes can be temporary. A person can changeeven by choosing to
return to his former prefer-ences. Other temporary changes can
includestudying abroad for one semester, sleeping ratherthan
partying, the boy or girl you date, the place
where you live, junk food over a balanced meal,etc. Just about
every free and balanced personhas opted for some permanent change
in their
life and has, at the same time, made temporary
changes throughout most of their life.
Do not be ashamed of inner change! Beforechanging, however,
think the change through.
The ability and willingness to change has causedadvances both in
the sciences and in the arts.
Persons have turned their life and that of othersaround by
changing and living the change thatthe world saw as inconceivable
or ill-advised.Erroneous knowledge has been corrected bysuch famed
persons as Copernicus and newfrontiers opened to us by such persons
as Ein-
stein. The world has changed significantly be-
cause some persons were willing to change theiroutlook and think
or act differently; persons
such as Francis of Assisi, Mahatma Gandhi, Dr.
Jonas Salk.
Significant and positive change has always ex-acted a price from
us mortals. Very often the
price has been self-sacrifice and the passing oftime. Everyone
the world rightly admires, eve-ryone that has caused us to change
the way wethink, how we live and what we believe, every-one who has
lived his pilgrimage on earth with-
out compromising the noblest aspects of his soulhas paid a
price. Perhaps the time has come foryou to pay the price for a
positive change, inter-nal or external. Dont be frightened. The
priceyou pay is worthwhile because the change thatoccurs is a sign
that you are in possession of
life.
CHANGE
College
Notes
fromNoble Wolf
Fr. Adolph Menendez, s.x. & Emily Stout, Poet
Global Youth Mission Services
101 Summer Street, P.O. Box 5857 Holliston, MA 01746
[email protected]
