Last night I was pondering if there were any ways of categorising Change and giving me some kind of framework to think about it within. After some musing it occurred to me that most change falls within one of two general categories. Firstly there are those things that remove something from you, like the gradual erosion of a boulder, slowly smoothing it down over time. Then there are those things add things to you, like the slow layers that build up round a pearl. Interestingly, both objects end up with their rough edges smoothed away.

Life seems to have this way of giving us either new layers through processes like education and growing up and growing older. It also removes rough edges by very similar means. Each relationship we enter has the potential to change us; each place we visit, each person we meet and open up to.

For me Life is a journey and I see its purpose as being the gradual polishing of the essential us. Sometimes the things that are the most painful shape us most, sometimes we can learn more joyously. When the going gets a little tough, it can sometimes, help to recognise this process at work. It can give us the faith to endure and perhaps open us to co-operating with the process.

“It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.” Alan Cohen