The inevitability of inevitable change

There’s noth­ing worse than hav­ing changes go on around you, the sort of changes that greatly affect your life, and not real­ise that they are hap­pen­ing at the time. One day, you meta­phor­ic­ally — and pos­sibly even phys­ic­ally — wake up and think, “Oh, everything’s changed. How did that happen?”

Then there are the changes that go on around you, the sort of changes that greatly affect your life, which you can see hap­pen­ing at the time, but which you feel power­less to do any­thing about. You find your­self some­where in the marshy middle ground between com­plete con­fu­sion and reluct­ant accept­ance, and that’s def­in­itely the worst place to be. The marshy middle ground is the equi­val­ent of sit­ting on the fence, or being stuck between a rock and a hard place. And if you’ve ever sat on the fence that’s been unevenly hammered into the marshy middle ground loc­ated some­where between a rock and a hard place, then you’ll be aware that it’s a decidedly awk­ward place to sud­denly find yourself.

So things change. People you once could talk to become people with whom you stumble over words and clam up after one embar­rassed sen­tence, cer­tain­ties of loc­a­tion and dir­ec­tion and inten­tion aren’t cer­tain­ties any­more, and Sunday morn­ing is no longer a relax­ing oasis of calm dur­ing which you lie in bed drift­ing in and out of sleep and con­tem­plat­ing the ceil­ing, but instead becomes a whirl­wind of thoughts as you catch up with your­self after three or four weeks so immersed in mis­cel­laneous stuff that you’ve entirely failed to keep track of what’s been hap­pen­ing all around you.

Actu­ally, as regards cer­tain­ties, I do have one. There is one con­stant. But I’m not sure I like it. So I’m not telling any­one what it is.

Stop the world, I want to get off. I want the planet to spin back a month or so and let me catch up. Because if it doesn’t, I’m not sure that I’ll ever fully understand.

This post con­tained one too many uses of the word ‘change’. I am aware of that, but right now intel­li­gent use of my internal thesaurus is way down my list of priorities.

If you under­stood none of the above, don’t worry. Remem­ber, that was very likely my inten­tion from the moment I star­ted writing.