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How to live under the stress of an ever-changing world and self.
Every day we wake up in a slightly different body. The changes, most times, are too minuscule to notice. We don’t suddenly grow an extra arm or lose a toe. But we are different, on a cellular level.
For someone like me, this fact of life is at the same time liberating and terrifying.
All my life I’ve tumbled from the need for things to stay exactly the same to the want for things to be totally different. The resulting anxiety coursing through my veins and controlling my mind is not a surprise but the logical result of a life lived in constant worry about things and circumstances I could never control.
Stopping to Smell The Roses
I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t a worrier, but I do recall times peppered throughout my life when I’ve felt the heavy burden of constant worry lift from my shoulders, become the shadow of a feeling, melt away.
Released from the tight grip of worry, I’ve been able to simply be, stop and smell the roses, sip the tea slowly, face the sun, close my eyes and take a deep breath. How simple, yet how essential.
At those moments I was totally present, totally there, and I could see and feel life was perfect just the way it was. The fact that the roses would wilt and die just made the moment we were sharing more precious.
The rose isn’t worrying about tomorrow or yesterday. It doesn’t have that. The rose briefly exists in a place without time. I do not. My whole human existence is bound to time, and when time passes, change is inevitable.
To Change or Not to Change, There is No Question…
Every day we wake up to a slightly different world. Sometimes we wake up and the world seems unrecognizable. We now live in a whole new world.
Two years ago I went to sleep one day, and the next the world was sequestered. The pandemic had begun. The flow of life and the city stopped and hid away. I found myself locked in my home, so did you. We still existed, but our existence changed.
Our lifestyle changed, our projects and how we went about them changed, our plans and dreams were suddenly dumped in the bucket list, some jobs were lost, others gained. The reality of change slapped us in the face once again.
A Whole New Wold for A Whole New Generation
This has all happened before, and it would happen again. To you, to me, to everybody, young and old. The older among us knows this, the younger want to fight or flight. Older Millenials like myself don’t quite know what to do.
This is our Spanish Flu, this is our world at war, international conflicts, market instability, depression, inflation, and all the other plagues of the Apocalypse. But I’m a humanist, and an individualist, so maybe I can find some peace in that.
Maybe I can go back to myself and look for the answers and comfort I seek to survive and thrive in a whole new world that clearly will keep slipping from the grasp, my illusion of control.
A Whole New World for A Whole New You.
The solution to this timeless conundrum is to embrace the inevitable change as a fact of life and as an opportunity. If we Millennials have learned something from the media that we consume (and consume us) is that we can always reinvent ourselves.
Yet, there is a constant je ne sais quoi that always remains. Who knows what that is, or where it’s coming from; the self. But if there is something that might be pointed to and defined as “you”, that is it.
Every day is an opportunity to get to know that timeless essence of you; all of you. Every day is an opportunity to see and experience the changing world with curiosity, a little anxiety, a little fear, expectation.
But most importantly, every day offers you an opportunity to act, to choose what to do, what to think, and how to feel. How to embrace yourself and the world? Take it as it is, and make the best you can with the time you have, between one change and the next yes, but also in that dreadful in-between.
That’s when the new lessons are to be learned. That’s when you get to uncover an inch more of yourself, the meaning of life itself, but only if you pay attention.
And because I could ever not talk about Paris… here’s a recently discovered quote I’m adding to the collection… and definitely makes me feel a renewed kinship with my favorite city:
Paris responds to change with the caginess of a concierge, acutely curious yet deeply suspicious. – Vanished Smile – R.A Scotti Share on XPS: A whole new world for this blog is here, after a long absence. I’m back because this digital space awakens a piece of that self I’m searching for. We’ll see what comes out of this new chapter. No matter what, it will be a way forward.
