Why do people change? Do people change? People change! Change! Keeping aside the word play above I think it is pretty evident what it is about.
Change is the only constant is something I have heard many times. So “Change” is inevitable. It is like Life or rather it is Life and it happens! we cannot stop it same way as we cannot stop time. But we the people fear change and in particular we fear change in other people; in people we love and sometimes even in people we don’t.
So bottom line is that people do change. But why? It is probably a collective result of the experiences and learning one has had in life and the maturity gained with age in terms of clarity in seeing and understanding certain aspects of life better than before. It probably has to do with incremental learning one gathers with every such experience. The kind of change to the better or worse would be a product of the quantity and quality of those aforementioned experiences in life. So this in essence means the person would be different to what that person was few days/months/years ago but how different and what does the different person look and feel like, would be the million dollar question!
So this lack of predictability of the change is the cause of the said fear in ourselves. If the “Change” doesn’t turn out to be the way we expect, we try to fight it! We fight with the other person who has changed but we are actually trying to fight the change we don’t like seeing. But the battle is lost before it begins because by the time one perceives the change, it has already taken place and made a home in that other person and fighting it would be like opposing the flow of time or rewind life! And by the way.. by then person fighting to rollback the change would have also changed in a different way. So what is the point of the fight?
So how do we cope? The one way I know would be to “Accept” the change like we do time and flow of life mostly. That would probably mean to reevaluate the situation or arrangement or relationship at this point in time with the “Change” in play and reconcile accordingly. Dwelling in the past would be futile. Also, there would be no place for regrets. Decisions made in the past would have been based on a certain understanding of a person who isn’t the same in the present and hence would call for new decisions.
On a closing note, the sooner we accept the reality of change in our lives, be it from Nature, People and just Life, the sooner we shall make peace with it or even prepare for it and not be in panic when change occurs.
