An Essay on Change

. 2 min read

Life has been hectic lately. The awkward time between finishing university and starting a career continues to be a daunting one. Even if it's exciting, it is still scary to take a step into the unknown. And that's okay.

Recently, I've taken comfort knowing I wasn't alone in the emotional whirlwind of graduating; everyone in class knew each other was going through. It barely needed mentioning. However, now that I've had time to reflect, I see that my comfort came from more than community. I had stumbled upon a simple truth of reality: I wasn't only sharing these emotions with my peers, I was engaging in an archetypal experience, a requirement for existence itself.

During times of uncertainty and chaos, we are at our most connected, because we share a fear of change with everything that exists.

This abstraction may seem grandiose, but when grounded in the reality of biology it makes perfect sense; evolutionarily speaking, it's understandable that life has developed with a healthy dose of 'fear of the unknown'. It may be hard to imagine but your fear of doing something new or different, of making a change, like a new career or moving to a new city, is the same fear that would stop you from being eaten alive by a vicious predator.

But fear is just warning sign, a physiological sceptic tapping on your shoulder and shaking its head, "Maybe this isn't such a good idea", it says, "things are going well, why change?". Warning signs though are very different from stop signs, and, if you are listening carefully, deep from somewhere in your consciousness comes a smirk with the distant but simple reply, "Why settle for 'going well' when things could be going great.". That is because there are two fundamental traits to 'change', one is certainly 'danger', but the second one is 'promise'. Just as evolution tries to protect us by giving us an in-built sceptic it also tempts us with the voice of an adventurer with a vision of greener pastures. It is by focusing on this positive side to change that helps me take leaps like sailing in the Caribbean and experimenting with my diet.

By focusing on the 'what ifs' and the potential held in doing something different or starting a new phase of life, one does not eliminate the fear, they justify it and move forward in spite of it.