Change is swirling around...everywhere

The past twelve months have been packed full of events that are fairly significant. People moving, babies being born (and arriving from Korea), new relationships starting, people becoming ill, people being married (some whom you'd never expect). This is all within our little sphere.

We have a saying...Same-o, same-o...which is interesting to me. It is said in a manner which would indicate that there is boredom with the status quo...we dislike stability, it would seem, while at the same time when change hits us we reel back from the concussion. Well, one theory is that while the universe is seeminly stable, it is really in chaos. Our frame of reference is so small that we take no activity in our realm for relatively short periods of time as stability, while in reality there are new galaxies being formed and old ones disappearing all the time. So why are we so perplexed sometimes when the status quo explodes?

Humans have many markers in life that we attach ourselves to: first of ...any number of things, graduations, marriages, births, deaths, you know the ones. We think that when something is not happening to someone we know or love that the universe is stable...same-o, same-o. In reality, for someone, some place, chaos abounds. OK, here comes the OB lesson: we have to learn to manage the change that swirls around us. We have a little more hapless word we use...cope...we have to learn to cope or survice with change. But coping is putting up with...we should really embrace change.

I am teaching 18 younger people about Organizational Behavior this spring and change is the heart of the course. Only this is not about reacting to change, but creating change in this chaotic world and making it stick. Some of us can do that well, and others of us have to be coached on how to adapt and establish a new norm.

All these lives that are changing that I mentioned above will never be the same. A baby is born into a family...major change. Now, do we cope with that or embrace it? Silly, of course we embrace it. Do we cope with marriage or embrace it? Ahem...better stop there to be safe. Do we cope with adversity, or do we embrace it. You don't have to love it, but we do have to accept a new norm.

My golfing partner from the other day lost her husband in an accident just months after they were married. She certainly did not want that to happen, nor did she love it. She grieved and now she is moving forward. I applaud her abilty to spring back in such a positive manner. But she is embracing the changes that are coming at her...which is the right attitude in this universe of chaos.

Sorry to wax so philosophical, but our prayer list grows. We ask God to strengthen, intercede and to make whole again, when the master design is to establish new norms. We can, and should fight back, but the reality is that these situations will pass...and most of them will seem like little blips on the radar scope of life in a few short months or years. Yes, and I firmly believe that God gives us the mechanisms either within ourselves or by sending others to show us how, to embrace the changes of life....if....we but ask Him.

Carpe diem, my friends.

Oh yes, this would have been my dad's 111th birthday today. I got to thinking about that yesterday. In about 25 years people who were born in the 1900s will be seen as old timers. I know that is how I looked at those born in the 1800s when I was growing up. All my grand parents and my dad were born before 1900. So I thought mom was cool because she was born in 1903. Yikes.