The winds will blow!
The winds will blow!
If we try to resist that change and stay as we are, it will be like trying to stand still in a gale force wind.
The wind will happen! Regardless of how much we may wish it didn’t.
The only way to survive is to bend with the wind, trim your sails, and work with it, without trying to fight against it.
It’s not the wind but the set of the sail that decides your direction. Or to put it in landlubber’s terms, it’s not what’s happening around you, it’s what you do yourself that dictates your future.
“One ship sails East,
And another West,
By the self-same winds that blow,
'Tis the set of the sails and not the gales,
That tells the way we go.” Ella Wheeler Wilcox
And why would you want to stand still? The world is constantly shifting around us. People come and go. Events happen. Rules and laws change. Fashions change. Society changes! If you’re not going to get swept away by these winds of change, you need to be trimming your sails to accommodate them!
It’s easiest to spot in the externals: are you still wearing bellbottoms and flower necklaces? Or perhaps you came from a punk era. If you froze yourself in time and stayed in the same uniform, you would be making a declaration that you don’t want to participate in the world as it is now.
Thing is, you don’t get a lot of choice! This is where we are. And if we want the world to work for us, we’ve got to change ourselves.
The only constant is change
Change is the only constant, said Heraclitus, thousands of years ago. And Marcus Aurelius followed up with this gem:
“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.”
These Romans knew a thing or two, I can tell you!
And learning from the clever guys who have gone before us is something we should never tire of. They worked it out! And yet we seem to have to discover it all over again, each of us in our own lifetime.
Some of us are moving forward and need to make only tweaks to our plan to go faster.