We Don’t Always Create Change; Change Creates Us

This past weekend, our kids visited their biological dad’s house for the first time in over two years.

For the sake of privacy, I won’t share many of the details, but you can probably guess: it was a big change. For them, for their biological dad, for my partner and I, for our community around us. Even our dogs, nonplussed for the most part, probably smelled the shift in the air.

And this morning as I sit to write this, I keep coming back to the same words:

We don’t always create change; change creates us.

I’m far more comfortable with the experience of being in control and using my agency and imagination to develop something new from the old. But most change just happens, entirely regardless of our desire for it. A car merges wildly into our lane and we have to adapt; an illness is discovered and we’re faced with what to do; the President sets a new horrific policy and we’re challenged with how to respond.

Change tends to require us to shape ourselves around its presence.

For my kiddos, this meant being a lot more tender in the lead-up to their visit. More big emotions, more questions, more worries, more long hugs seemingly out of the blue. For my partner and I, it meant leaning into the logistics: how to best prepare them, how to prepare their biological dad to have success, how to make sure our home held them with love and care beforehand and after. And of course, feeling our own big emotions as well.

And as it often goes when change happens, I’ll be processing this newfound reality for quite awhile.

The newness of change and what it unearths in us and around us lingers. This is part of why I think it’s so important to stay gentle with ourselves and what we believe the outcome of any change “should be.” The truth is, I don’t know what comes next – but I trust in my family’s capacity to meet it and hold the messiness of it without losing the center we’ve come to know.

So that’s my invitation for you this week:

Whatever change you find yourself navigating, how can you meet it with gentleness and intentionality? What might become possible if you trust in your capacity to hold the change and to shift with it, while staying true to your center?