Change is in the Air

Excerpt from Daily Cures, Wisdom for Healthy Aging by Connie Mason Michaelis

How can you live in Kansas and not embrace change?  The weather is a significant teacher in our part of the country.  We are always anticipating and preparing for the next season, enjoying the current season or suffering through the extremes of a particular season.  It is like a school designed to teach us life lessons.  But I think fall is like getting an extended recess!  Fall is a spectacular time of year with the colors, the temperatures, the intense sunsets.  If you were an alien and came to the Midwest for the first time and experienced fall, would it frighten you?  First, you would experience the colorful glory of the season, and then, apparently, everything is attacked by some horrifying malady.  The leaves fall off the trees, the plants curl up and die, and the days get short, dark, and cold.  It looks like the end of the world, and there is no way to stop it!  Those of us who experience this every year take for granted that the season of rebirth will faithfully return.  The aliens will never understand until they experience the lessons of seasonal change. 

Change is a natural part of life. It’s exhibited in nature continuously.  We can reduce our unhappiness about it if we learn the lesson of the seasons.  Something beautiful is always around the corner.  All suffering is caused by resistance.  It is like the alien running around hot gluing the leaves back on the trees; he just makes himself sick because he doesn’t know yet!  Change is the one thing we can always count on.  When you decide not to resist change, but to embrace it, your entire life experience can be transformed in an instant. 

“We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.”   Joseph Campbell