Changes

The pin pictured above is one of my favorites. I once admired it on a friend, and when I left my last job she gave it to me. Shannon died a few months ago, but the pin is on my jacket and I think of her every time I see it.

Change is something we all live with. Some welcome it and others dread it, but no matter how we feel about it, it's a powerful motivator. I've always tried to welcome change even when negative, because it carries with it such valuable lessons. For me the word has usually meant new vistas, new friends, new beginnings. Change.

There are other kinds of change of course. There's entropy (brought to us by the second law of thermodynamics) which tells us all things decline, disintegrate, fall apart. Organization decays into chaos, plates break, walls crumble, and where concrete erodes, weeds sprout and flowers bloom. Entropy is everywhere and humans are prime examples. No matter how we fight it, we age, decline, and die. Since I'm writing this on my birthday that idea has a special poignancy. Change.

I have witnessed a great deal of change in the last eight weeks, which is one reason I haven't been here writing. My husband is now on hospice. This alone feels shocking, and the change has brought a bevy of new people into our lives, caregivers of every kind and miscellaneous others. The phone rings far more than it ever has, and my "alone time" has shrunk markedly. Change.

I try not to think ahead to the great change that is coming, but at times I find myself slipping into daydreams, mostly about how nice it will be when the hospital bed, lift, table, and two wheelchairs are removed from our small premises. I regret these thoughts but humans are essentially selfish; I refuse to feel guilty.

In the broader world we are faced with astonishing, even shocking changes that were unimaginable until they weren't. I can do little about that either, except heap praise on those fighting to uphold the norms and laws that we all took for granted before T***p. The pace of change is no longer a stately and steady altering, but a clock warping slide toward dystopia. We can only hang on and try to remember that change is good. It is opportunity, it is possibility, it is life and it is death. We might as well welcome it. Change.