I struggle with change, and I’m no different than you. They’ve change my favourite’s app layout and I don’t know what to do. Why? I ask. And now what?
That’s a really stupid example, OK. What about something bigger? Would there be more resistance? I guess. I don’t want to have a new manager, I don’t want my colleague to leave, I don’t want my children to grow up, I don’t want to move, to get divorced, to meet someone new, to age, to suffer, to go through pain. I want things my way. I want things to stay as they are.
But they don’t, do they?
And then I say to myself: change is the only constant; it’s an opportunity to grow. Or whatever I need to tell myself in that moment 🙂
As Pema Chodron writes in “Comfortable with Uncertainty”:
“The third mark of existence is suffering, dissatisfaction. To put it concisely, we suffer when we resist the noble and irrefutable truth of importance and death. We suffer not because we are basically bad or deserve to be punished but because of three tragic misunderstandings.
First, we expect that what is always in the process of change should be graspable and predictable. Because we mistake what is impermanent to be permanent, we suffer.
Second, we proceed as if we are separate from everything else, as if we are a fixed identity, when our true situation is egoless. Because we mistake the openness of our being for a solid, irrefutable self, we suffer.
Third, we look for happiness in all the wrong places. The Budha called this habit “mistaking suffering for happiness”. We become habituated to reaching for something to ease the edginess of the moment. Thus we become less and less able to reside with even the most fleeting uneasiness or discomfort. What begins as a slight shift of energy – a minor tightening of our stomach, a vague indefinable feeling that something bad is about to happen- escalates into addiction. This is our way of trying to make life predictable. Because we mistake what aways results in suffering to be what will bring us happiness, we remain stuck in the repetitious habit of escalating our dissatisfaction.”
