|
Champions of change exhort
you to flow with the flux. For we now live in a world in which the rate of
change is the biggest change. Resist it at your own peril, you're told. So
how are we to respond ? Since prophets of Future Shock often go after the Big
picture-- what President Bush Sr. called 'Vision Thing' -- The nitty-gritty
of handling change without hurting your personal history, geography, or
biology is left to lesser mortals. They have no option but to muddle
through. Taming change thus becomes somewhat akin to cultivating happiness,
which Charlotte Bronte famously remarked was "not a potato, to be planted in
mould, and tilled with manure".
So how
does one 'till' constancy in the face of change ? For starters, check if you
feel oppressed by your habitual ways of thinking. Are they holding back
creative change and transformation ? If so, think about what Eknath Easwaran,
the spiritual teacher known for his method of 'passage meditation' ("What we
think about constantly, we become; that is the secret of meditation and
prayer.") said. You find that while most of us hanker after freedom to
master continual change , in reality we are deeply afraid of it. That may be
because we are held hostage in life by our likes and dislikes, bound as we
are, as Easwaran says, by countless little preferences in food, clothing,
decor, entertainment-- the list goes on and on.
Also beware of imaginary thoughts and fears,
about the past or future. Easwaran speaks of them as "setting up our own
haunted house and peopling it with our own special ghosts. "In another
metaphor, he equates feckless thinking with making "a Sears catalogue" of
our fears because we have so many of them. The good news, however, is that
the way we respond to small matters reflects the way we will respond to the
larger challenges of life. If we can only begin to release ourselves
from our little likes and dislikes, we will gradually find that we are
gaining the capacity to weather bigger upheavals. Then we can begin to face whatever
comes with zinging sangfroid.
In the final analysis, Easwaran praises the
freedom and happiness that self-forgetfulness brings. It is similar to an
artist disappearing into his or her latest creation. He talks about the ways
lives have slowly been changed as people practice kindness on a daily basis
and refrain from responding in anger to slights or humiliations. Small step.
Big Journey. |
