You’ve changed! Anybody ever say that to you? I haven’t heard it recently, although I know people think that about me. But I have heard it periodically over the course of my lifetime, always delivered with a negative connotation. Like change is a bad thing? Seems like it usually comes from someone who has not changed a thing in years. Hasn’t changed a point of view, hasn’t changed a perspective, hasn’t changed an ideology, a rationale, a conclusion, a family dynamic, their taste in music, or even the route they drive to work every day. It usually comes from someone who is either stuck in the 60’s and has never changed their drugs, or stuck in a pew and has never changed their dogma.
But it seems to me that change is an essential ingredient in living. Jeez, even rocks change, becoming shaped by water, wind, and the hands of time. If rocks, in all of their stoic resistance, succumb to the inevitable without kicking and screaming, surely the rest of us could embrace change with a little more dignity and grace. As I have always said “if it don’t change, it ain’t alive.” Actually, I’ve never said that, but from now on I always will!
The minutes of the day change, the weeks, months and years do the same. The seasons change. We change our clothes, our cars, our jobs, our habits and routines. We change our circle of friends, our hobbies, our magazine subscriptions, our television interests and our address. Eventually we get gray, wrinkled, blind and stooped. We see things differently. Along the way we change everything, and everything changes. And then someone say’s “you’ve changed”. DUH!
Seriously, when people say that, they’re usually referring to their OWN inability to relate to the changes that have taken place within you, or within the dynamic of your relationship with them. They’re not really saying ‘you’ve changed’, as much as they are saying ‘WE’VE changed’. Or ‘you’ve changed, and I haven’t’. I understand that such an awakening can be painful for someone whose expectation has been that ‘things will always be the same between us’. But things can never always be the same between people. It’s like saying things will always be the same between day and night. But between day and night is dusk, and dusk comes at a different time every day. It comes with a different sky, a different color, and a different temperature. So it is with people.
Mature people will allow their friends and family members to change and grow in their own way, in their own time, and with the clumsiness that usually accompanies new movement. Immature people will do their best to try and inhibit an individual’s growth to suit their own life of guarded, and habitual, conformity.
Next time someone says “you’ve changed” I’m going to try and remember to thank them for noticing.
