Why Are We Afraid of Change?

“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.” 
— Robert Frost

Springtime in the Rockies is a volatile season. Seemingly endless days of sunshine and warmer weather suddenly turn to blizzard conditions. Locals know most of our snow falls from March through May, and some years it feels like summer might never come. But she always does. Old Man Winter slowly, if not begrudgingly, loosens his cold grip on the world, and a season of growth, warmth, and beauty returns. But this change does not come without a fight.

This change from winter’s dregs to summer’s sun doesn’t happen on a linear line of progression, it moves with fits and starts, one step forward, two steps back on a never-ending cycle of life, death, and re-birth. Order dissolves into chaos, only to give way to order once again. We need only pay attention to Nature to see the universal truth in this primeval rhythm. It’s her way of reminding us nothing stays the same, that we too are in a permanent state of transformation: living as we are dying, decaying as we are being reborn. And that’s life. 

One of the hardest lessons to learn is surrendering to this process, to welcome a season of needful change by loosening our own grasp on the attachments, beliefs, and identities that need to die if we are to be renewed. “To change is one of the great dreams of every heart—to change the limitations, the sameness, the banality, or the pain...But change is difficult for us. So often we opt to continue the old pattern, rather than risking the danger of difference,” writes Irish teacher and poet John O’Donohue. 

Our ability to not only cope with, but welcome even volatile change will only happen by learning to live in the present, changing moment. Life goes on. It will be different, it may not be as good, but it still goes on.

A Poem 

Now ebb, now flood, now friend, now cruel goe;
Now glad, now sad, now weel, now unto woe;
Now clad in gold, dissolvit now in ash;
So dois (does) this world transitory go.

— William Dunbar, “O wretch, Beware” 

What We’re Reading, Listening To, Watching

Melanie

• Listening to: The Big Day by Chance the Rapper

• Reading: The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope for, and Believe by Richard Rohr

Gary Alan

• Listening to: Silence by Dave Thomas Jr. 

• Watching: After Life by Ricky Gervais (Netflix)

NOTE: This was originally published in our bi-weekly e-newsletter, Liminal Spaces. To get future issues delivered to your inbox, sign up here.

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