Change

So today I am struggling to finish up a project for school. As I was working on it, my mind started straying to what I might write about today for you. After some careful thought and the realization that my school work is going to require of me much more attention than originally anticipated, I went through some of my current writings and decided to share this one with you.

My instructor asked us this year to write a 600 word or so paper on 'Change'. She gave us a limited amount of class time to do this in; about 30 minutes or so. I enjoy writing so this activity did not necessarily present to me a challenge; so I turned it into one. I wrote about change, but not necessarily in the sense you might think; but then again, maybe so. Please enjoy this light-hear-ted twist on a topic meant to bring out the serious.

Change

Every day, most every individual has to deal with change. Sometimes the change is ours, other times the change belongs to someone else. What it all boils down to is that we will all have to deal with change throughout our lives. The amount or size of change is irrelevant. The importance is how we take this change and how we use it to better ourselves.

I face change on a daily basis. In fact, within the first hour of being awake, I am generally dealing with change. It starts at Tim Horton’s when I hand my crisp, five dollar bill to the counter person who gives back to me change. I tend to ignore change when it first arrives by stuffing it deep down into the dark recesses of my pockets, but it isn’t long before the weight of change I am carrying around begins to take its toll on me.

Everywhere I go, I hear the incessant nagging of change as it follows me. I do my best to function at my peak performance, but the unrelenting thought of change on my mind and how I will deal with it draws my every conscious thought away from my daily routine. Time becomes fleeting and before I know it, lunch has arrived and the pains of hunger take the place of the constant worry over change.

Where I eat never affects the change that I must endure.  Sometimes I think that I should bring my own meals with me to avoid the necessity of having to deal with such a large amount of change. There are days when I use my debit card to pay for my lunch and this helps me to deal with the change, but it is not always possible to do this. So each day, the weight of change continues to grow and I remain stuck in this cycle of suffering.

I have read that there are many ways in which an individual will deal with change. Some are far worse than others, but all and all it seems as though most people have difficulty in accepting change. Most want nothing to do with it. I find it truly amazing to behold they, who with little care or worry, are able to accept change with such ease. I have sought professional help in order to properly deal with my change, however none were able to ever completely relieve me of my difficulty with dealing with change.

For many years, I felt alone in my battle in dealing with the insurmountable amount of change that had been seemingly dropped into my life over the years. Many a restless night I lay in bed wondering if I would ever win the battle against change. Then, as I lay awake, sobbing in a pool of tears and fears, the answer rolled into my thoughts and almost instantly, calm overcame me as I had an epiphany on how to overcome change.

I slept better that night that I had in a decade knowing that upon waking in the morning, my struggles with change would be over. On that beautiful day, I arose from my slumber like I would any other morning, except today I was ready for change. Today I was ready to deal with any change that might come my way for whatever reason.

The key to dealing with this continuous amount of incoming change was to understand the change, what it represented, how to organize it and to examine its true value. It took nearly three months of sorting through the chaos that was all the change I had carried with me over the years. Many times, the battle seemed lost and I felt near the point of collapse but I endured. My perseverance was justly rewarded in the end.

It has been several years since I finally learned to deal with all the change in my life. After learning to cope, my life has changed drastically for the better. Within a few short hours of completing my own self-therapy program for change, I found that I my life had become significantly richer than it ever had been before. Each day I look forward to the change that life brings me so that I can turn something that once plagued my existence into something that promotes it.

You see, I realized that I didn’t need to hold onto change; that I could accept it and incorporate it into my life. Change is nothing to be feared but rather something to be welcomed. By not ignoring the constant change thrust unto me and rather accepting it with open hands, I was able to properly organize it into my life. The effect of this is immediately visible. The weight you carry with you is gone; the sound of change nagging in your ears will cease; the fear of being overburdened by its quantity will no longer hold you down.

It is important to understand that change will always be there. Nothing that one can do in one’s life will completely absolve one of having to deal with change. The importance of change is not the change itself; nor is it what comes about because of that change. No, the importance of change is how we, as individuals learn to deal with the change in our own lives. By learning to effectively manage your change, you can better learn how to help others deal with their own change.

The method I developed to work with my change was to first of all make an account of all the change that had come way over the past few years. After I had a tangible image of what I was dealing with, I began to sort through and categorize the many different types of change. Sorting out all the change one has dealt with is no easy task, but it will make it much easier to come to terms with your change.

After many exhausting hours of sorting and categorizing, comes the second to last stage of our work with change. With my change now properly separated, I rolled all the change from the various groups together into smaller, even divisions, grouped together to make the change easier to handle. Once accomplished, I took my change, examined it, thought about it and finally gathered it all up and stored it away in a safe place where I could easily access it again to review all the order I had put together from the chaos of change.

Learning how to deal with change has been one of the greatest accomplishments of my life. It taught me how to be strong, how to persevere, how to succeed and how to make my life richer. How we learn to deal with our own inner turmoil in demons is essential to the happiness we will enjoy during our life. These things may seem very complex at times however many times the answer to them is actually very obvious and straightforward.

The answer to my problems was simple. When change happens in your life, don’t ignore it: look at it; hold it; keep it. The change you get may be small and seem invaluable but if you just take the time to examine all the change together, you would find that you are much wealthier then you imagined because of having to deal with change.