Monday, July 16, 2012

Watching the Sky through the Branches

If you don't manage change, change will manage you.

When I thought about this (and how many times in my life I had to face change's awful and graceful moments) I came to the conclusion, I've become an expert on the subject of change. Through trial and error and tribulation, I've managed to wash up and wash out with life's most harrowing and delightful moments. In this I'm not unlike you or you or you and even . . . you. Still, if there's any subject, with supporting details from life's experiences, that bears sharing among the human species, it is how to manage change.

Now I can hear the scoffers ask whether it's loose change or pocket change, but despite the frivolity lurking in mockery's halls, an understanding of the topic is the key for shooting this rapid we call existence. In fact, and this is my own personal observation (ye ol' IMHO), self-worth is defined in terms of how we manage change in our lives. If we bob around the sphere like a weather vane, blown by the wind, we're bound to be bullied by circumstance. However, if we make the same gyration like compasses with an eye on magnetic north, we can hold our ground and spit in the bully's eye.

The first thing to know about change is that it is . . . changeable — nothing truly steady or eternal. So to ride the bucking bronco of relocation, employment shifts, retirement, financial earthquakes, marriage, birth, death, spilled coffee and the passing panoramas of vacations come and gone (not to mention the heartbreak of psoriasis) we must find a place to ponder — to make sense of the senseless. You must find a place within yourself — within your imagination — a place that doesn't change. A fixed place. Retreating there, you can savor change like dishes at an Roman banquet, selecting and rejecting that which fits self cultivation. For me that place isn't a beer garden, but a quiet one — a place under a wisteria tree, where I can look up and see the sky through branches. Each branch is filled with blossoms — the sum of my life experience, and hung so I may consider their fragrance in the light of new challenges and opportunities. It's a place to take resolve.

So from under the wisteria tree, I emerge to share my views on change management and will try my hand at it over the breadth of this blog. I'll dispense good advice and bad advice and sometimes no advice. However, like all things known and shared, I have a legacy — a collection of nuggets stored beneath my sanctuary — a bastion monument warding off change's finality.  My blog is new, but the subject is old, reflecting a myriad of possibilities afforded by change — the bully, if we let it push us around.


Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net