Abrupt Changes

How do you react when changes disable your plans? Have you learned to use acceptance to change your attitude? Can you change from negative to positive so you keep dancing even in the rain?

Awakening from my coma, with a head injury and a full blown physical disability, and finding that everything had either changed or was in the process of changing destroyed who I was, or who I thought I was. Before the unexpected changes, I loved life. After the changes, I despised life. I hated it. Why? In retrospect:

Changing my mind

I hated change because I feared change. I was afraid of facing life as a person with disabilities, but why? Why did I fear it? I feared it because I wanted to fit in, have a good job, do many things that having a disability makes it hard or impossible to do. I feared it before I really looked it over, and because I feared change. I hadn’t even considered what living with a disability would be like. I hated it because familiarity breeds comfort and unfamiliarity breeds contempt. I was not familiar with having a disability, so I was uncomfortable until I changed my perception.

Unfortunately it took me years to accept my new life. My first discovery after quitting fighting my situation and beginning to accept it was that the truest thing about changes is that the more you fight them, the tougher they get. Accepting changes allows you to see possibilities in the changes. Seeing possibilities in my changes keeps my spirits up and allows me to steer my changes.

Change Secret

I suppose some initial resistance is natural if or when a change puts us into survival mode. Just make sure you are conscious of when this resistance is no longer serving you. The life changes I encountered were out of my control. When I quit trying to manipulate the situation and wishing things were different, when I quit fighting with and hating the changes and began flowing with them instead, I became open to learning a great secret involving change:

“Suffering occurs when we resist a change that is already happening.”