Afraid of Change?

There is a wonderful spiritual exercise in Jack Kornfield’s book, Path with A Heart on learning. It suggests that one move through life with the outlook that everyone you meet is a Budda...enlightened, if you will…and everyone “gets it” but you. Your task is to figure out what they are trying to teach you. It’s a really interesting exercise, especially on those days when nothing appears to be going right and the “human factor” keeps tripping you up. You know, the cashier who is moving too slowly for you, the child that has just drawn with permanent marker on your wall, the manager who expects you to do more and more with less and less…

In the past several years I have learned a great deal about flow and surrender and how to adapt to change upon change. It wasn't always that way, particularly when the change represented a loss for me. The year 2000 was a year that nearly brought me to me knees with an unprecedented number of highly significant changes, and losses in my life. It was during that time that I had the pleasure of spending nine days with a very cool Buddha, my then 5 year-old-nephew, right before they moved to Portland. Their move was very difficult for me and absolutely a change I did not want to see.

Here are a few highlights from what he taught me (or did he just remind me of what I already knew?):

• You can play Duck Duck Goose for hours with only 2 people.
• Simply throwing a blanket in the backyard instantly transforms macaroni and cheese into a picnic feast of “the best food my mom has ever made”!
• A camera in the hands of a child reveals a side of you and your world that you can’t always see by yourself…a side you should see more often.
• Sometimes kids just want you to sit in the yard and blow bubbles with them instead of going to an amusement park.
• Sometimes you might just want to sit in the yard and blow bubbles.
• Tickling is fun.
• There was a time when you saw Canadian geese (or frogs, or chicks, or lambs or ducks) for the first time and thought they were the coolest things in the world.

And, finally, as we were driving Jacob to the airport, through construction and all the mess that is O’Hare, he told me the secret of his success. We sat there on the drive, watching all the cars and construction equipment and planes (which are pretty cool to a 5 year old), telling Knock-Knock jokes and talking about Portland.Me, trying not to think about how very much I am going to miss him; Jacob thinking about the really big plane he was going to ride in. We were talking about all that he had done since leaving his home on the whirlwind tour to visit family before the final move. I was thinking about all the traveling he had been doing, the upset in his routine, the big transition ahead and what all this change must be like for this little boy and he smiles and says,

"Yeah, every day is a new world for me!!”