YVALIKS

Life is made up of seasons: cold seasons and hot seasons; forever changing. Change is actually an unavoidable occurrence in our life journey. However, if you ask most people they will tell you that as humans we don’t always love change. As a matter of fact, most people are scared of change and takes quite some time to adjust to change.

I remember when I was studying my Business degree, my accounting teacher recommended a book to us. It was a simple read but he stated that it was one of the best book ever written. This book was called: ‘Who moved my cheese’. The book follows the story of two groups: mice and humans. Both groups go each morning collecting cheese at a specific spot and returned with it back home. This happens every day. However, one day the cheese is no longer at the specific post. Someone moved it. When the the mice found out, they decided to change their journey and go to another place to find cheese. The humans on the other hand, stayed at the spot, wondering where the cheese went and complaining of the change. They spent hours and days even speaking about their misfortune and make no effort to move on. The book then went on to give examples of four individuals and how accepting and managing change helped them grow. So what is it about change that can left us crippled and makes us refuse to move?

The truth is the reason we struggle the most with change is because we fear the unknown.  When things change, even when we prepared ourselves for it, it can be scary mostly because we do not know what to expect. One can never predict what is around the corner. Even when we can have control over our decisions, we cannot always control our circumstances. Most of us do go through a process when it come to change, especially when it is a drastic change. At first we are shocked and we can fall into denial. Just like the humans in the cheese story we cannot believe what is happening.

We then can get angry and start blaming ourselves or others for the change. Depending on personalities, the curve can be shorter or longer but eventually the period of transition then move to acceptance and action. Additionally, as christians, we can look up at a constant God who can carry us as things and situations around us change. There is this a story in the Bible about a house built on the rock that does not break when the winds blow. God represent the rock. When we are rooted in him, we can remain hopeful when life rocks us back and forth.

In reality, we cannot always stay where we are because we will never grow, and we need to growth. God wants us to growth. We all ought to develop ourselves. Our bodies are a testament of that. We all came in this world as babies who could not talk or walk. But we learn and changed. We became children who asks questions and then read and write. We then became teenagers and puberty lead us to adult bodies with hormones fluctuations and different ways of acting. We could not have stayed babies forever. Such is life, it has variations just like the seasons.

Changes are inevitable. They will happen. Some will be good, Some won’t be. Some we will expect and desire them. Others we will dread and refuse them. Some will make us happy and some will broke us. We cannot avoid them.

But we can learn how to deal with them. I learn the hard way that if you fight change they make your life harder but adapting to change can actually help us progress. Let all be like the mice in the story. And you never know, maybe there is better and bigger cheese waiting for us somewhere else. The only way to find out is to accept the change and move on.