Permanently Changing

 

The final call for passengers was over and I already had my seatbelt on. The fasten-seatbelt sign wasn’t even on yet but I fastened it on anyway. I took out my iPod and looked at the other passengers. Some were passing by the aisles and placing the baggage at the overhead bins, others were reading the in-flight magazine, while the rest were just spacing out into the window. I don’t know what they were thinking, but I do remember what I was thinking about at that time. That was the first time I was leaving home to live without my family, I was on my way to Manila. 

I started riffling through some notes from my friends back home, which might have looked real emo if I started to slash my wrists along with reading them, but blades aren’t allowed on board. A lot of notes had the “Don’t change, stay the way you are” line at some part of it, but one other note, and I remember this accurately since it was the only note that said “Change for the better.” 

What is life without change? Without change, life is just some boring plane of existence where everything is what it seems. Change brings ups and downs wherever it goes, because a new change comes from some other change’s end. So there’s one thing in change that we all hate and love at the same time – that something has to end.

The first time I went to the States, I wished it would last forever. I loved the cool, crisp, air on my face, enormous toy stores, and the food, oh the food! It was an entirely new world. I was only seven years old then but I was already thinking of the little concepts behind change. I started to think about it when my parents told me, “Two more weeks then we’re back home.” Then it all collided, and I realized that this utopia would end, that all this was going to change.  

As the aphorism has it: the only thing permanent in this world is change. It’s really ironic how this is true, that the only unchanging effect is change itself. This makes me wonder about that note that said “Don’t change, stay the way you are.” Is change really that bad? Come to think about it, what would I be without change? I’d be boring, like a statue that just grows older. But I know, these kind of notes are usually polite versions of things that might sound offensive. This note for example might be translated into “Don’t turn into a jerk, stay nice.” 

  Perhaps that’s the prevailing attitude towards change in our society – the negatives are the first to be taken note of.  This isn’t all wrong to take negatives into account early, though. Thinking about the negative consequences are important in deciding to change, because sometimes you can’t get back that something before the change. There was a time when I had my own desktop computer back in the day, and I used it most of the time. Eventually I got bored of how it looked, especially the start up screen. So to fix this, I searched the internet for a theme that I could install to change this dull, monotonous start up screen. I finally found this video game theme that I installed, so now the start up screen is this poorly drawn cartoon terrorist that I thought was cool when I was 10. After three years I tried to uninstall it but I couldn’t, I couldn’t change it back because I didn’t look to far ahead, oh no!

  One thing that always sticks with change is that it’s never boring. Even in the case of negative change, it always catches your attention. So this leads me to think about what goes on in heaven. I suppose heaven isn’t a boring place, I think heaven is a place of constant change where everything is infinitely changing for the better. Sounds exciting if you think about it, things are always getting better, a little better all the time like that old Beatles song, that yesterday was never as beautiful as today, or today will never be as beautiful as tomorrow. 

  Changing for the better is a brighter and more optimistic way of looking at change than telling you not to change at all. It’s a more heroic way of viewing change as something that alters your personality. Instead of fearing it, you accept it and embrace it as a means to get better. It’s been around a year since my high school graduation, when my class had to split up for college. Some went abroad, some stayed behind, and some went to Manila, like me. So last December, nine months from our graduation,  I met up with some of my old friends from high school. One of them came all the way from Singapore, and other from the University of Asia and Pacific. Yeah, they had changed, living away from the family can be a big change in life. But what struck me more was that they still had the same quirks that I loved back in high school. It was like the same guy with an entirely new twist. So we had a long talk in a small Starbucks somewhere in Ortigas, where we caught up on many things and reminisced on all the things we used to do in high school.  

I guess that’s what someone usually means when he says “change for the better,” it’s not a complete Bruce Banner – Incredible Hulk change, it’s more of a renewal. It’s a mix of the new and the old, like seeing a old friend with a crazy new haircut that strangely looks great on him.

 

The reason why we try to resist change is because we fear what we’ll leave behind. Change implies loss, like when someone changes, a part of himself dies. It’s hard to accept this because maybe that part has been with us for a long time, and we don’t know how we’ll survive without it. Yes, change might take the part away, but who knows, it might just give you something better.  

~ by denisSsSsSs on March 15, 2008.