During a family vacation, I was swimming at a beach along the shores of Lake Ontario, when an observation stopped me and really deeply made me think. The water was flowing easily and peacefully around anything that was in the way, including my own body swimming in the lake. There is no upset or angst that it has to change its path and flow around it. It just simply moves around it and continues its flow. Also I noticed a leaf floating on that water, which allowed itself to be carried without resistance, without objection, without pain. It just flowed upon the waves and surrendered to the flow of the water.
I was thinking about how most of us as humans, myself included, resist change. Something unexpected comes along and we freeze, or resist, we may cry, feel pain and do whatever we can to return things to what we know…to the familiar. Change brings the unknown and that can feel frightening. I wondered, what would happen if we suspended our judgements and feelings of fear about change?
In nature, change is embraced. In the flow of the water, the floating leaf, in the budding rose, in the opening chrysalis as the butterfly emerges, change is welcomed and embraced. We see it in each of these as well as in the gracious surrender in the changing of the seasons. Among trees, animals, seeds, wind, and the Earth as a whole.
As I thought this through, swimming through the water that day, I wondered how my life might be different if I embraced change in the same way in which the water flows...serenely, without resistance, surrendering to what is, and being open to where it will carry me. What if I welcomed change with curiosity, and withheld my judgement of it as scary or bad? We need time to process change, to become familiar with it. It is possible that just maybe, we might find that it was the best thing that could have ever happened to us. It just may lead us in the direction of our dreams.
