Strucknwords

Brilliant Stephen Hawkins once said, “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change”

Based on the discriminatory societal norms of his time, Sam Cooke sang about change.

Change comes in all forms, from lovers to jobs to environments, from medical to societal, and on and on. Sometimes just the way our bodies change can freak us out! Globally and nationally, change seeps in, although it seems to take forever.When you come across legislatures such as the one in Texas, you have to wonder if the 21st century has even begun. In Texas, they must need more guns.

This fear of change that we see via the media aligns with some of our own hesitancies in life. Instead, people buy nicer things that they can’t afford to fill the void. We stall using whatever means necessary. Money has a brilliant way of preventing change, and unfortunately, people control money. It’s not the other way around.

Why does change have to be so hard? It is scary, yet beautiful, but surrounding America’s Independence holiday, that’s what it’s all about. We can’t do anything right without moving forward, as Amy Goodman of Democracy Now writes in “This Independence Day, Thank a Protester.”

Like it or not, change is going to come. Sam Cooke was and will always be right. A lot of people desire it like a bad habit.You want the change because your internal being has clued you in that it’s time again. It’s time for some change and you simply can’t ignore the challenge. The group fighting for their rights will win-it might take too many decades, but in the end, they will succeed because they want it badly enough. All around us, people are making statements about issues that they care about and people are making changes in their own lives because they need it.

All things considered, life asks that we throw away that cowboy hat, and put on the wig!

It kind of stinks that it always has to be so scary and so hard, but one of my mottos for life is that you must be slightly uncomfortable in order to actually be learning anything.

Along the route of being uncomfortable comes more acute self-awareness, and for some, that means more independence, but I’m not convinced that everyone wants true independence, not anymore. And, I certainly don’t believe that America is fighting for independence, not anymore. Like most people, when I was younger, I craved independence. When you get your first car, you founded your own country because all of a sudden, you could drive off, and do almost anything you wanted, as long as you had the gas money to get there. I would look at some adults and desire what they had, and in my mind, many of them were modeling independence, but now, I recognize that most humans aren’t role models for being independent. We are all just trying to figure out how to be happy on all levels of our lives.

How does that happen? In part, maybe it’s from working at our changes. Facing them. Fighting for them. In the end, that is what provides people with new freedoms and deeper understandings. I’m not so sure that America will ever truly be an independent nation, but we can learn from her efforts and her mistakes in the journey for change.

JFK once said that, “Change is the law of life and those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”