The Current of Change

Some Thursdays, I sit down to write, but my mind is as blank as the white screen. Looking from blinking cursor to out the living room picture window and back again, I think: There’s nothing to say. I have nothing to say. Nothing has happened.  

But everything has happened, yes? The little moments of life have marched on, spilling over, adding up into hours, days, a week. The grass has grown. The oak leaves are greener. A delicate yellow butterfly dances over the deep pink roses that bloomed from yesterday’s buds.
 

“I haven’t changed, though,” I think to myself. I look down at the floor, absorbed by thoughts, my gaze, inadvertently, taking in my hands and legs. All the same.

But what naivety. What ego. What blindness. Nothing – not you, not me – is impervious to the power of change. Though undoubtedly perceptible through the vast collection of time, imperceptible change inches along with every move on the clock. It, without fail, during each and every waking and unconscious moment, edges us forward in ways slight and unnoticed. Quietly shaping our worldly and subtle bodies. Silently shifting our life experience.
   

It is easy to think of change as a swift motion. The sharp thud of a hammer. The blink of an eye. The decided dropping of a gavel. A life-altering judgment, a sentence that occurs without warning. In a tv episode I saw once, a character walks through Central Park, with a friend. It is September or October and the leaves live golden on the trees. She is absorbed by conversation until, suddenly, she looks around and says, astonished, “When did it become fall?”

But there is no single moment it becomes fall. Or spring. Or summer. Or winter. It becomes fall all year long. Tiny changes occur from minute to minute. Life moves on all the time.
 

Though far below our radar, change flies tirelessly, day and night. Unravels the notion of stability and casts aside the comfort of constancy. Because we are all interconnected – this entire chaotic universe – there is no escaping it, no single living or material thing above change. Like the steady, continuous current of a stream that shapes rocks, we, too, are swept along by its power.

“Nothing has happened,” I repeat to myself with resistance, disbelief.

But, really, everything has.