I couldn’t sleep, though my eyes were heavy and the warm comfort of my bed was inviting to my weary body. Questions were running their course through my mind, and so I got up and turned to the only medium that the lonely night has for one such as myself, my computer, and an open slate to post my thoughts.
What troubles me tonight is change. I’m sure I have mentioned it before, and no doubt will mention it again, but I am astounded by how change rules our lives. In any given moment most of humanity can be said to be adjusting to some change in their life. It is the constant, how ironic that the only unchanging nature in this world is that change will happen. It is how we deal with change, though, that bothers me. I myself have recently gone through a change, one that I thought I could weather without too much difficulty. But then I began to realize how we measure change in our lives. We do not remember the middle of something that has happened to us, we remember the beginning, where the event is new, fresh, and the change shifts our focus. The first time I did this, or the first time I met someone. We remember the end of an event as well, the last of something, the final of this. The middle events are often forgotten because I think in most situations, the event itself is not important, but the change wrought on the individual by the change in circumstance. Sad changes make us melancholy, depressed, lost in a world of haze and mist, while good changes lighten our mood, bring smiles to faces, and fond memories.
I know that change is necessary, if life never changed we’d eventually perish, I am sure. I do not understand, though, why change has to be so difficult. I know it is the hardest times in our lives that temper us, but it seems as I look back that most of the change I remember has been painful change. I can see the events that saddened me as I grew up, moving away from home, knowing that the place where my parents lived would always be home, just not mine anymore. Leaving friends behind, the change from some friends to things that were closer, for a time, but have now come to produce nothing but silence. The change as I realized my responsibilities, realized the time to depart from the ease I had of life to a more difficult journey that I had to take alone. The change of losing that special someone due to the circumstance, and the change that makes me long for the smile of a three year old and the uncompromising, faithful, simple love of that one year old boy.
It is this change that hurts so much, that keeps me awake in the night. I do not know why we face these changes in our lives, why I must face the changes I see now. I honestly do not think I care to know now, all I know is that the hurt is too great for me to care.
