Spring and autumn are the two seasons where I notice change happening right before my eyes. Right now, in October, here in France, we are beginning to see leaves change colour. I love to gaze for a few moments at a plant like this, where some of the leaves are still bright green, some have patches of red or brown appearing, and some have gone fully deep red or even purple.
This reminds me of two things – the first is that change never stops. Everything in the world is constantly undergoing change. We are not the same today as we were a few weeks ago, and we are very different from what we were a few years ago (just browse through your photo albums to see how you’ve changed since you were a baby). The reality is that we change moment by moment. That’s why the advice to “be present”, or to “be here now”, is so relevant. Every single moment is unique, and if we breeze past it without noticing, it will be gone forever (except, of course, in the background of our subconscious the changes never cease to play their part).
The second is that change is so variable. It is heterogenous, not homogenous. You and I are unique. Our daily lives are unique. Our moment to moment experiences are unique and become even more unique over time, as nobody shares with us an exact personal history, an identical string of experiences. Just looking at this one plant and seeing the huge variation in colour as the leaves begin to change makes me even more aware of this uniqueness, of diversity.
So awareness of change slows me down, inspiring me to savour this moment, to live today as fully as I can. It inspires me to pay attention to the flow of Nature, to be aware of the fact that there are no fixed objects in this world, only different rates of change.
And awareness of change does something else for me – heightens my appreciation of uniqueness, of difference, and of diversity. Reducing life to abstractions, selecting single characteristics and bundling everyone who shares them into a single category is such a deluded way of living. We need to stop putting people into little boxes, labelling them and judging them, because when we do that, we just stop seeing them as they really are.
Heroes Not Zombies 