Letting Change Happen

"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance." ~ Alan Watts

We resist it, sometimes - probably often.  Mightily.  Yes.  And sometimes it happens so quickly or so unexpectedly, it simply happens, and there is no time to react.  

Change.

For something that is such an integral part of being human, you would think we'd be experts.

But we usually aren't.

I may be thinking about it in a way that isn't exactly accurate, or maybe just one particular way, and this may seem a bit obtuse - when I was a child, I recall playing the piece Tarentella on the piano.  I was very young, and it was an easy piece, but not-so-easy when you are learning.  What IS "easy", really, when you are learning something new?  

I loved playing that piece.  I would play it over and over.  I can still remember a part of the picture that was on the page (there was a dancer and a spider, as I recall), and you can look up the history of it if you like, which is rather more intricate than anything I've known.  How it came to me tonight - and how I realize in this moment it rather beautifully relates to the quote by Alan Watts - is this notion of a dancer who isn't really paying attention to the music that is playing, and change is happening all around, but the dance just keeps continuing.  This is so very relevant to the era in which we find ourselves, unlike anything most of us have known.  

We think the dance can be the same, and we try to keep our patterns going.  But the music isn't playing in the way it was before.  

Everything is different.

And when we finally manage to notice, deeply notice, we can either decide to keep resisting or to flow with it.  

That's how life moves forward.  We let change happen.  Because it will.  And we will dance, in new ways, when we do.  And the music will accompany us and expand us when we let it.

Sacred Forest Sunset photo by Susan Larison Danz.