Change for the better
All of us change over the years. The child grows up to become a man or woman. The seed becomes a tree. And the cub grows up to become a fearsome animal. It is not just living creatures that change. Even the shape of mountains and the
course of rivers change across centuries. Though everything on this planet changes, we do not accept change easily. Yet, we are changing constantly — even if we are unaware of it.
In fact, we never seem to be aware that we are changing. If you meet your friends after many years, you will be surprised at how one may have become grey and the other may have developed a stoop. And though you may have both gone grey and got a stoop, you are not aware of it until the others comment on how you too have changed so radically! We are confronted with the impact of change only when we sit with our photo albums and turn the pages!
Albums and friends can provide proof that we have changed physically. But it is almost impossible for us to gauge the extent of change we have gone through qualitatively and physiologically. Last week I wrote about a person who has been blaming everyone but himself for his inadequacies and failures. He was not like this in his twenties, I understand. He had a dream and he wanted to conquer the world, like most 20-year-olds. Then something went wrong. Now, 30 years later, though his old friends see the startling change in him, he cannot see the change in himself. Why is that so? I ask myself. That is because emotional change
is imperceptible. But across the years, its impact is so huge
that we can barely recognise ourselves.
We all agree that those of us who are short-tempered fiends or dominant parents or nagging spouses were not always so. We have acquired such baggage over the years due to circumstances, or our own machinations.
Few can see the baggage we carry, but if you do, there is hope. All is not lost, for if we can change for the worse, we also have the power to change for the better. We can only change, if we are aware of what we have become.
We resist being aware of what we have become because for years we have always been shutting out the feedback from well-intentioned sources. So the first thing to harnessing the positives of change is to listen to criticism from all quarters without justifying your perceived ineptitudes. The objective of the exercise is to be honest with yourself, to be aware of your deficiencies.
The next, and hardest, part is to act on the feedback. There are a myriad solutions which have been written about in this column over the months.
Detaching yourself from the problem, meditation, anger management have all been gone through in detail.
Choose an approach of your choice, but as I said, the key issue is to be first aware of your problem. Only then can the change begin.
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