That wind of change say'n we’re not in Kansas anymore…

I’ve felt the wind of change quite a few times in my life. When it appears it’s like a tiny breeze that’s just cold enough to make my ears start aching uncomfortably.

No, my ears don’t actually ache when I feel the wind of change, but I feel ill-at-ease. I am aware of something unspoken, something intangible, something “arriving”, and I wait for what it might be. (It often starts a couple of months ahead of change.)

Sometimes change finds me and is for the most part out of my control. But more often, change comes when I am faced with a decision. It usually has me choosing whether I remain exactly where I am, or has me considering the unknown. Unknown being scary to most of us. So really, I’m choosing whether I want to be stagnant, or be brave.

As I’ve written before, I keep learning that things I’m afraid to do, or scared of, AREN’T what I thought they were. In fact, these big scary things keep being shown for what they are once faced… which is no big deal. Like the little man behind the green curtain. He’s not some big awful wizard. He’s just a little dude operating a megaphone.

And what do I (or any of us) get for choosing change? We get a lack of stagnation, which can mean a million different things. It can be a new job, it can be a new viewpoint, a new friend, or new peace of mind. The side benefit of this, is learning it’s ok to choose change. Even if the walk along the yellow brick road is bumpy; bumpy doesn’t have to be anything we worry about. Or if upon arrival all we find that little dude with the megaphone… he’s nothing to worry about either. All told, the journey is full of a million different little things, and the lack of stagnation is what makes life so great.

An old Indonesian proverb says: “Learning from a teacher who has stopped learning is like drinking water from a stagnant pond.”

We should be saying “eww”, because who knows what awfulness lives in that crusty/icky water. You wouldn’t want to drink it, and you shouldn’t want to learn anything from someone insisting they already know everything, or that there is no more to learn.

Also… Sometimes we are the teacher we learn from. We mustn’t stop, we mustn’t insist on no change, we mustn’t be stagnant. We need to allow ourselves to grow and change and live and learn that life gets better when we step foot on that bumpy brick road. And know -the end of the line isn’t that little dude and a megaphone.