Change

Posted on April 21, 2004 in Hope and Joy

“You know,” I said to Lance the last time we talked. “This change business doesn’t come easy. When you start to stand up for yourself, a lot of people get very pissy. I look outside and it’s starting to look lonely out there in some ways, but lonely as being out in the desert and seeing the land without the concrete and the bumper to bumper traffic.” I looked out the window at a heavenly bamboo whose bright red berries heralded the latest phase of the cycle.

“They don’t want you to change,” he replied. “They want you to be in their show. You’ve got to live your own life.”

I’ve always run scared, believing that life without people would ruin me. But unless I move to Mars, there will be life with people. Good people and bad people. I choose my company and grant them the right to choose or not choose me.

It takes time to stop listening to that voice which says “You must care what people think, especially if they’ve got friends. They will tell other people what an awful person you are. So either you must discredit them or give in.”

I think I do best when I stop worrying about what people will think and strive to know myself. Not in the hard, battering, crush-imperfection-mode in which I have been brought up, but with compassion. If I cannot be good to myself, all my charities towards others will ring hollow.

This bit of wisdom struck me as speaking to my condition, agnostic that I am:

For thirty years, I sought God. But when I looked carefully, I found that God was the seeker and I was the sought.
  -Bayazid Bistami

That, in its way, is how I am changing.