Once, in a place where I keep my thoughts, I wrote: “Familiar things bring stability and suffocation; new things bring anticipation and fear.” I like the word change. Simply saying it aloud makes me strangely excited and full of expectation. It feels like picturing a sea stirred by wind and rolling waves.
Yet the other side of the word is that change necessarily contains fear. We naturally tend to live as we have lived and think as we have always thought. So many people maintain nearly identical attitudes toward life and choose to avoid change.
But we must recognize that moving forward in life always requires change. The world keeps changing because some people overcome the temptation to settle and continue to advance. Change comes only to those who seek it. From that perspective, perhaps we must repeatedly send ourselves out into the wilderness. Of course, change is frightening. Placing ourselves in unfamiliar surroundings and venturing beyond what we know can be terrifying. Yet, as the saying goes, “Whoever wants to be born must destroy a world.” The capacity for renewal is an innate gift of our species. Do not be afraid of change, then. Welcome what is new, break open your world, and become a person of deeper and broader understanding. Complacency is poison; moving forward is a necessity.