Reflecting on Change (2022)
This was the very first post on my blog, ivodr.com. I still love it and am excited to share it with you. Hope you enjoy it—let me know your thoughts in the comments!
It’s a beautiful day in early January 2022 and thanks to an extended Christmas break I am still at home in Italy. After practicing yoga together, mum and I decide to catch some sunlight and go to the nearby lake for a walk.
Walking through the reeds in the peaceful biotope I bring up a thought that had been on my mind during these past days - days with so many precious moments together: My awareness that everything eventually ends, that one day the period of time we are given together here on earth will end. Thinking about this, I say, I feel some sadness and attachment but also immense gratitude for every moment together.
Mum answers: I rather see how everything is in constant change. This makes every moment so precious.
Together we realize that there actually is no real end to things, at least there is nothing constant or permanent that could end. Instead, life is just a series of changes.
Thinking about the finiteness of our lives, we might fall for the illusion that there is this number of years without much change that we are given with our loved ones – and that then suddenly life is over. In reality however, until that day so much is going to change: we will change, our lives will change, the people around us will change and even our feelings about death will change* - so that at that point death is just another change.
Mum adds: This awareness of life's ever changing nature helps me both in bright and dark moments: In bright moments it helps me take the moment in more fully, in difficult times it reminds me that they too will pass.
*Maybe the feeling that it would be too early now, that we would miss out on so many moments with our loved ones, might transform into the feeling of having had a good and fulfilling life and being ready for stepping through the next door.
I’d like to add two thoughts that are part of my toolkit for difficult situations:
We need the challenges in life because they help us grow. As long as we suffer, it means we didn’t figure life out completely yet and that there is still more stuff to learn. For that, any difficulty can be seen as a pointer to something to learn.
The Buddha taught that pleasure-pain, gain-loss, praise-blame, fame-disrepute (the Eight Worldly Winds) are, and will always be, part of human life. Therefore, instead of pushing them away or resisting them, we should accept them as part of life and learn to relate to them in healthy ways.