Sudden Change

To help here are some more ideas on how to be pliable and go with the flow that I will share with my grandson:

Baby steps. Take things in small steps. Try to bite off a huge chunk, just bite off something small at first. So make your first attempts to go with the flow small ones try to focus on your breathing. Then try to get perspective after you breathe. Try the easier situations first

Keep a journal. This is one of the best uses of a journal I have been told. Once a day, try to recall what situations or changes happened to you and then write about those situations. Why did you get upset? Why did you laugh? What did you try to do? Did it work, and if not, why not? What can you do next time? This kind of recollection and examination, after the fact, will help you learn from the process.

Meditate. I am not good at keeping a journal, but I at least I do a daily review in my head. Do some meditation, or drink a cup of tea, or walk as a way of de-stressing. As you do this go over the day and examine it. I do some deep breathing and then go over each situation, trying to see it as a detached observer.

Realize that you cannot control others. I sometimes get frustrated with other people; because they do not act the way I want them to act. It took me a great many years to realize that they are acting according to their personality, according to what they feel is right, and they are not going to do what I want all of the time. Once I learned to accept that I could not control them and that I had to accept them for who they are, accept the things they do it helped I was less frustrated.

Accept change and imperfection. When I get things the way I like them, I usually do not want them to change. However, they will change this is a fact. I cannot keep things the way I  want them to be … instead, is it not better to learn to accept things as they are. Accepting that the world is changing, and we are a part of that change helps keep me in balance.

Enjoy life as a flow of change, chaos, and beauty. Do you have an idea that you try to make the world conform to? Guess what; that will likely never happen. Instead, try seeing the world as it is, messy, chaotic, painful, sad, dirty, beautiful happy and completely perfect. The world is beautiful, just as it is. Life is not something static, but a flow of change, never staying the same, always getting messier and more chaotic, always beautiful. There is beauty in everything around us if we look at it as perfect. And as my friends say life is better than the alternative

Insight into change teaches us to embrace our experiences without clinging to them; to get the most out of them in the present moment by fully appreciating their intensity, in full knowledge that soon we have to have to let them go to embrace whatever comes next. Insight into change teaches us to hope. Because change is built into the nature of things, nothing is inherently fixed, not even our own identity

Therefore, for my grandson, whose tools for meeting the future may be obsolete the day after they are invented, I will encourage him to sit down and sit still while the winds of change blow over, under, around and through him remain flexible and enjoy whatever life changes bring. Life may be short but it is good