Change is a frightening thing to many people. It is a frightening thing to animals too, but the difference is defined by animals only seeing change as momentary, all done in an instant, and they move on. People seem to hang onto their fear of the new, no matter what the cause; trauma, joy, health, situations or a myriad of things our brains can come up with, whether true or imagined.
I watched a movie this week named, Finding Dory; a cute cartoon with many deeply hidden quotes of wisdom from a little blue fish, Dory, that no one thinks can even have a serious conversation since it has no short-term memory and keeps forgetting what it is told.
Dory’s ideas are constantly belittled by her friend, the ironically named tiny clownfish, Marlin, who is set in his ways and expects everyone to believe in his narrow views the same as he feels. The fish go through one trial after another. At one point, Dory goes off on her own because Marlin won’t listen to what she is saying. They do finally meet up again and Marlin finally realizes that Dory was right all along. She followed her heart, or you could say she followed her intuition.
When we get into a situation where our stomach feels like it is full of butterflies, we should not ignore that. It is our intuition telling us that something is not right and we should not follow what our own ‘Marlin’ minds are telling us out of fear; not wanting to leave our comfort zone. What we know in our hearts many times is that change is coming and we are resisting. Then the butterflies come into our gut.
Perhaps we need to observe how animals cope with change. If the home of an animal is destroyed, the animal will move on and find or build another without hesitation. If a predator is nearby, the animal feels fear for an instant and will hide, but will soon emerge and go on with its daily business as if nothing happened.
People are different. If a house is destroyed, or we have an accident, or someone dies we have a tendency of dwelling on that trauma in our minds. The fear, regret, guilt, grief or one of many negative things can be like a dark seed growing in our mind, darkening all our positive thoughts. We are afraid of the change caused by our situation.
Instead of asking, “Why does God let these bad things happen to me?” we should rearrange our minds to accept change as something God puts in our path to help us learn and grow. We decide what life lessons we want to work on before we come to Earth and sometimes those lessons are very harsh for us. Change can be harsh. We can either lie down and sink into a negative, depressed state, or we can rise above it, learning from what went wrong and move onto a new bright path.
In the movie I saw, Dory doesn’t lose hope. She takes all the bad things that happen to her as stepping stones. She stays happy even with adversity. She accepts change and moves on. We never know what is around the corner. Follow Dory’s advice: Keep on swimming, keep on swimming, keep on swimming, swimming, swimming.
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