Evolving Realities

Nothing ever stays the same in this world. The realities which define the boundaries of lives are no exception. The realities that define our lives are constantly evolving and morphing into into successfully different forms during our entire lives.

Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily. As people we also evolve and change. When the realities of our lives do change, the context in which we live each day will change. We grow as a person and because of our experiences and the bits of wisdom we pick up along the way, we become a somewhat different person. We still retain the essence of who we are. However with each alteration, we refine our lives or are pushed in a direction in which we were not intending to go. However neither is change necessarily a good thing. Sometimes the situations which we must confront make us weaker or sadder or have the potential to damage some aspect of who we are. Unfortunately, our lives do not come with a guarantee for a happy ending.

However, whether these changes bode good or ill for us, we must somehow respond to changes and make adjustments to our lives. Our personal realities will have changed before we are fully aware that it has happened to us. After we have become aware that our "world" has changed either subtly or immensely, we have to make mid-course adjustments in our behavior, in our thinking, in our actions and in our understanding of how the world works for us. We will have to do this a thousand times in our journey through our lives.

Most of the time, our lives will evolve in a pretty predictable way. For most of us, our lives are not extraordinary lives, in the sense that we will ever bask for very long in the spotlight. For most of us, our lives will be filled with what passes for a normal existence. We will be born, spend time growing up and receive our educations. We will find a soul mate and create a connection to that person. We may have children and raise them. And when we have done that, to enjoy the later years of our lives. We will have careers that will be a parallel journey we will also make. But for the most part, there are more commonalities to our lives than substantial differences.

There is that other possibility. We can choose not to make the necessary adjustments. We can refuse to accept reality and attempt to live in a world that we want to exist, but which no longer exists or which never existed at all. When we choose to do that, we get stuck in place and cannot move on. We end up risking damage to ourselves and to our relationships with the people about whom we care a great deal. We can become angry, embittered, depressed and frustrated that our lives are not working out as we want them to. We are trying to impose our sense of how the world should work on a world that doesn't care a bit about what we think about that subject. And we will suffer because we hold fast to illusions about the realities of our existence. We will pay a fearful price for doing that.

There is a natural pattern to life. First our lives will change and the realities of our life will have changed. In time, we can choose to recognize that those changes have taken place and make adjustments. We can choose not to do that. But like it or not, the context of our lives is going to change over time, and we will have to reinvent ourselves somewhat every time that happens, so that we can continue to be productive human beings and to move on to what happens to us next in this new environment that change brings. That particular reality is unchanging and etched in stone.