Dear Me,
There is a saying I have heard a few different ways, and I am not all too sure who originally said it. Sometimes this saying talks of the Day, sometimes of Life and sometimes of Change. Choosing to use the word Change, the quote goes,
“Change leads the willing. It drags along the reluctant.”
how you choose to view change is important. Because no matter what you do, how well you plan and prepare, no matter how much you ‘got this,’ there are some changes in life you are just not going to have any control over. It is illusionary to assume that we have complete control of our circumstances. This is not to say that we have no control. Only that there are other external factors and forces that effect our circumstances. At any given moment, we have only as much control of our external environment as it allows us to have.
Now, in moments of unexpected and unwanted change, there is one thing that we can control, and that is how we feel. At any given moment, no matter the circumstance, we have the ability to choose how we feeling about it. And it is out of these feelings that our actions, or our reactions, spring.
Granted, all to often our feelings are reactive. But these reactive feelings are a matter of habit. Habit of mind that has built over time to be automatic and without thought. And we can change how we reactively feel into a better ones if we take the time to first investigate and recognize these habits of thought, of feeling; and secondly, take dedicate the patience, persistence, and self compassion for error and continual correction, to change that habit to a better one.
We can decide how we feel, and thus, how we react. We can choose to wallow in this change, choose to resist it, and we can choose to be petrified with inaction by the fear of it; or we can choose to accept it, to embrace it, to work with it, and to make the best of it; to change it. Because, as Heraclitus so rightly pointed out, “the only constant in life is change itself;” and change does lead the willing, and it drag along the reluctant.
–Dear Me Original Thought
Dear Me, 