Patience with change ...
is respect for the present
“[P]atience with all attempts at changing … is respect bestowed on the present…” Maria Popova
This quote, from Maria Popova’s An Almanac of Birds, caused me to pause when I first read it. Of course that is true! Taking our time to move away from what has been is a way of honouring what’s gone before even as we’ve outgrown it or recognized its unhelpful (perhaps even destructive) presence in our lives. It’s taking a moment to move away from what has been into what will be, a leave-taking. And one to which we don’t normally attend.
Too often, we look to what is to become and we simply move forward it - eager for change and pressing on to the destination or the outcome we hope to achieve. But the truth is that we could never imagine achieving something new were it not for our present circumstance - perfect or flawed as it may be, our leave-taking painful, perhaps undertaken with dispassion, or embraced with joy or excitement. Sometimes, change is forced upon us and we kick and struggle against it. Sometimes we have chosen it intentionally, yet find ourselves stumbling, our assumptions far ahead of our capacity for understanding it.
Perhaps, as Popova encourages us to do, consideration for where we are, who we are, what we love, and what we can no longer abide might helps us, ease us on our way to what we want, who we want to become, respecting the place we have filled and the role we have played even as we move into a new one. There is nowhere I can go that is not “from” where I am, no journey that does not start from right here. Whether that place - here - be a place I have loved or railed against, it has offered me the imetpus to go, become, change into what comes next and for that, alone, is worthy of appreciation and respect.
This post is an offshoot of my A Whole Lot of Broken Substack, based on the work of Maria Popova. It includes reflections written as a regular morning discipline and based on the artistic visual and poetic work Popova offers in An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days.1
For me, and I expect for Popova, words like “divination” do not suggest something supernatural; rather, they speak to the extraordinary capacity for poets, artists, and imaginaries to articulate truths we don’t normally run into or calculate in the routines of our day to day. In my opinion, the word “divine” is best understood when spoken as one tosses a hot pink feather boa over one’s shoulder. Read more about Popova’s project on her website, The Marginalian.
Thx Gretta
Larry