Life: It Keeps A-Changin'

When I took AP Biology in high school, I remember a deep sense of anticipation when I realized we were soon going to be studying Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.  My school, and particularly my AP classes, were predominantly LDS.  And only the most liberal among us had the nerve to even speculate about being descended from apes.

 

And then, much to my surprise, I agreed with Darwin on something.  Part of the premise of natural selection is that those who are most adaptable are those who are most likely to survive.  And this idea of adaptability as success and survival tool made a great deal of sense to me then.

 

This idea makes even more sense to me now than it did to me then.  Ever since graduating from college, my life has been a steady barrage of change.  First a break-up.  Then a job.  A move.  A shift in job responsibilities. A test.  Graduate applications. Three sets of home teachers.  Another move.  Job changes.  Roommate changes.

 

In fact, if nothing much changed for a sustained period of time, I would begin to suspect I had died and somehow not realized it.

 

Whenever people used to talk about how the only constant is change, I used to snort; as a teenager, I was a particularly inflexible sort of person.  Everything in my world was supposed to go the way I expected, and change was completely unacceptable.  Especially change I had not orchestrated.  I needed to feel in control then, and that was how I thought I controlled my world best--by refusing to accept anything outside of my rigid life view.

 

My mother used to recite one of her favorite proverbs to me: "Blessed are the flexible, for they shall never be bent out of shape."  I would roll my eyes, thinking "I'm solid steel.  No bending here."  (I found my views on steel shattered later, when I learned that the hardest types of steel are also the most brittle.)

 

The transition from my freshman year of college to my sophomore year beat any ideas of inflexibility out of me.  A transfer from one school to another required a great deal of flexibility, an adjustment of certain mindsets, and a near infinite amount of patience as I transferred records and mapped out my new path.

 

After that, I decided fighting change was a losing battle.  Those who can surf the wave of change are those who find themselves staying on top of the situations instead of folding under.  Better yet, the best change surfers find ways of directing the wave.