Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not!!

Change can come in many forms. It might come like a tidal wave, or like a glacier.

It might arrive as devastating tragedy, difficult choices, broken relationships, or even new opportunities. And though change is often difficult, many times it is also for the best. Often the only way to improve our lives is to force ourselves through a difficult change.

Dealing with uninvited change is painful. Instigating major but necessary change is frequently just as painful. But whatever change you are dealing with, how you cope with it will shape your future.

The glacier is the dangerous one

Of those two images, the tidal wave gets all the attention, and I think that is a mistake.

A tidal wave announces itself. It is terrible, but you know exactly when it happened, everyone around you knows too, and you respond. Nobody sleeps through a tidal wave.

The glacier is the one that takes people’s lives without them noticing. A career drifting one degree off course a year. A friendship that gets slightly less frequent every season. A relationship where nothing bad ever happens and nothing good happens either. There is never a day when it is obviously wrong, so there is never a day when you act.

Then a decade has gone.

The tidal wave you survive. The glacier you have to actively look for, and almost nobody schedules time to look.

Remember: “You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.” - Wayne Gretzky

The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing that you will make one. If you run, you stand a chance of losing. If you don’t run, you have already lost. To create more positive results, replace if only with next time.

By changing nothing, nothing changes.

Sometimes good things fall apart so that better things can fall together.

Never, never, never, never give up.

Resisting is the part that hurts

Things change. Friends leave. Life doesn’t stop for anybody. Life is a series of natural changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow.

Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.

I have come to think most suffering around change is not caused by the change itself but by the argument with it - the part of us insisting it should not be happening. The situation costs you something. The argument costs you far more, and it runs continuously in the background.

Dropping the argument is not the same as approving of what happened. You can think a change is unfair and still stop demanding that reality take it back. One of those is a judgement. The other is a fight you cannot win, and it is exhausting you.

It is often said that change is the only constant. The world as we have created it is a product of our thinking, and it cannot be changed without changing our thinking. Any change, even a good one, comes with drawbacks and discomfort.

Change is the law of life. Those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.

If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Remember: “The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.” - Nathaniel Branden

There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction.

The audit nobody schedules

So here is the practical version, and it takes twenty minutes.

Once or twice a year, sit down and look at the slow-moving things: work, health, the friendships that matter, whatever you said you cared about. Not to judge them - just to ask whether each one is closer or further than it was a year ago.

That’s it. The point is only to make the glacier visible, because the one thing it depends on is not being looked at directly.

Most people never do this, then wake up at forty wondering how they got somewhere they never chose.

-Kashish