Master And Slave
Change or Be Changed
Have you noticed change having this characteristic? When it occurs without our design and management it usually disables or robs us. When we architect it, more often than not, change benefits us.
We will change. That fact is inescapable. The choice we have is this: will we attempt to own and manage our change, or will we wait to discover what change has wrought on us?
To my mind, the first choice spells success, the other defines failure.
Producing change before change produces us, is surely the single largest differentiator between man and all other life as we can see it?
How tragic it must be for people who refuse to exercise this choice, and how gratifying for those who do.
Like change, pain too is inevitable. Yet one is the pain of striving to produce, excel and master change. The other is the dull pain of trudging along, resignation, and waiting for the witnessing of what change has wrought.
The pain of our trudging along is usually blamed on, or attributed to someone else. There is even a deluded pleasure that accusing someone else for our misery brings to us.
It’s more potent and ruinous than any other substance one could be addicted to.
At the other extreme, the pain of striving is pure joy. You know it. You’ve experienced it. You’ve tasted its thrill. You take complete ownership of it. You feel so complete.
This is the type who say with great and abundant enthusiasm “ I’m your resource, use me.”
In contrast, those trudging along seem to be consistently whining, “I want to be boss.”
The one owns self and circumstance. The other wants to. The one is alive, the other existing.
Perhaps our longest and toughest journey is from intent to action, or from thought to articulation. The most accurate definition I think, of ‘Growing up’, is the real distance we’ve travelled on that journey.
Our age surely is simply a number, not a milestone. If anything, it serves only as a reminder that we will soon be running out of flesh – or exchanging realities – and it is useful to have built ourselves up as far as possible.
The pilgrimage is within. When we refuse to make the journey, we are refusing to choose life. When our intents are seduced by comfort and our thoughts silenced by our fears, we remain at a level of existence.
Our calendar may say “80 years old” but somehow, sadly, nothing changed. “Circumstances” continue to mow down our thoughts. “Reality” continues to evaporate the perseverance of intent.
Life is a pilgrimage of the self. The living architect change; they who exist await it.