WHAT have you been today? Is this a question of perplexion or one that sparks excitement? All of our senses seem to answer at once! “I’ve been so busy, kinda tired, hungry to no end, overwhelmed, hot, cold, dreamy, annoyed, super tense, excited about what I just saw or maybe “I am the one who brought the main dish, the one that got stuck cleaning the oven, grateful I am almost there, halfway through, ready to give up, still fighting the fight…. ” Inumerable answers want to jump in and report their whatabouts! While some of these are temporary, some feel so permanent they are part of our identity and instead of speaking only of today, they speak of something permanent about us: “Always everybody’s go-to, the winner of the game, a truly loyal friend, Dad, the one that invented the recipe, the Principal of this school, Super Grandma, or someone who always looks great in blue!”
We live in a natural world so just as light refracts in response to speed and shape by changing its waves as it moves from one medium to another, all-the-while developing into optical illusions…. so do we, as natural and responsive human beings who react to stimuli such as emotions and beliefs, refract ourselves into WHAT we must be to keep those visions we have of ourselves alive inside of our ideas.
Considering William Cowper’s observation with regard to changing fashions: “Variety is the spice of life,” it was never really the clothes themselves that were regenerating but, rather, the minds of the designers, the wearers and the society that was co-creating by taking on a style! The Greek philosopher, Heraclitus’, very similar statement reached far wider in his conclusion that “Change is the only constant in life.” While spotlights will be attracted by glittery dresses and colorful hats, deep thoughts, pen-in-hand, will pull us into enlightenment. It will be everyday life and which attention we choose to give to WHAT part of it that will also illuminate not only the presence of fluctuation and alteration in our lives but equally so the sustenance that they absolutely are to our being able to actually live them!
We end our day in darkness, in the click of a lamp to a closed eye only to awaken to a beam in that eye, now open, from a brightly lit day. While we have learned to predict whether the new day will be a warm one, a cold one or a windy or wet one, we have not yet learned how to force it to be either one and so begins our instant adaptation with a pair of sandals and shorts or a warm jacket and an umbrella because, of course, the change will be the constancy, the ironically most reliable factor, and so our day goes on until it, again, changes into night with modifications in just about every moment of that time span whether the old tree we drive by is dropping old leaves or growing new ones, the teacher that assigned us yesterday’s homework is replaced by a substitute today, the grocery store is out of our favorite cereal or stocking this new season’s fruit instead of the one we had grown accustomed to, or the pants we put on last week that zipped beautifully now won’t close around us at all.
Silently but surely, continual transitions maintain us! If this is not fully evident, it can be easily tested: Simply try breathing out all day without converting to breathing in! Try running your meeting at work today with your two-year old voice and vocabulary. How long can you go without a haircut and still keep your reputed appearance? Will what we made for dinner on Monday still serve up fresh and tasty this Friday? It sounds exhausting and just the imagining of being in constant alteration is enough to start the yawns that make us yearn for protective sleep. Great instinct and yet….when those eyes close again tonight, transformation will continue to take over in order to assure we are at our utmost wellbeing as our blood pressure will automatically drop so that we can rest and allow our bodies to repair muscle tissue, our glands will secrete the hormones we require for growth and metabolism, amongst other processes and, especially interestingly, our brain will increase our blood flow to limit our bodily movement to protect us during REM sleep where we will hallucinate what we must process in our minds only from where it is safe to do so, instead of when we are awake which could prove too difficult or dangerous. There is a reason we only allow ourselves to dream of falling off cliffs instead of attempting to do so! Interesting, too, that we can all imagine and fear the feeling of it.
WHAT an ally we have in change! WHAT a remarkable support system! WHAT an enhancement to being alive! It can only prompt us to wonder: “WHAT are we today that we had yet to be yesterday and can look forward to becoming tomorrow?” Well Darwin would smile in approval at the fitness of our minds in proposing that question, knowing full well from his well-studied deductions, that by this question alone we are definitely survivors.
So, knowing this, tomorrow we will all be up bright and early, or maybe not ‘til past noon, setting higher goals, giving up the midnight snacks and the pounds they bring with them, changing from entry-level positions to CEO salaries, acquiring degrees and new languages to study for them in and running that extra mile at every corner right? Well there’s a hitch if one can pardon a pun. Like horses in front of an ol’west saloon, we all have that interruption from the rope tethered to the post right as we are ready to gallop past the hills on yonder….and that is the other constant in our lives we still need to address as it lives also in our bodies, in our hearts and in our minds: It is Our Dear and ever so clingy Friend, the one that always grabs and pulls us lovingly toward it crying “Stay with me. Stay right here.” Ah yes, Hello Ego, right as my mind was giving in to the dizzy delight of the high atmosphere where all imaginative thought balloons rise, here you are again to remind me that if I dare to forget WHAT I am without all those frightening ideas of change, which you have continuously described to me as effectively disastrous, I may just question that WHAT that I am and grow into WHAT I could become and evolve to instead! Hey…..I just might end up experiencing and evaluating, enlivening and expanding on that road they call IntraYou again. Thanks so much for that pull on my string “old pal?”
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