(This is an Iphone5 photo).

Any shrink or spiritual counselor or healer can testify that many people want to change, but few people do change. I think this is so, this is my experience. Change is an integral part of life, but few people actually do change, and I understand why this is so. Change is painful, painstaking, frightening. I remember a diabetes doctor telling me that in 30 years of practice only two patients had elected to change their lifestyle and diet rather than go on medication. They didn’t want to change.

It is also an axiom in the divorce world that in most unhappy marriages one person wants to change, the other doesn’t. A spiritual counselor told me the most frustrating part of her work was that so many people contacted her seeking help in changing, but it was the rare client who really wanted to change or did. I believe I really wanted to change, and I find that I have to work at it just about every day of my life. Change involves understanding the way one things, fighting years, even a lifetime of habits and reflexes and environmental shaping. The mind resists change – so does the body, often, sometimes fights back powerfully to keep it from happening.

The world resists change too. People who change are widely seen as unstable, even threatening. They are having crises, mid-life or other. It is almost always easier not to change than to change. The major institutions of life – medicine, law, media, politics, portray change as terrifying, dangerous, foolish, even treasonous.

There is a point in people’s lives where they feel – or are made to feel – that they are too settled, it is too late. There are mortgages to think of, retirement, kid’s college tuition, health insurance, IRA’s, Mom and Dad, friends and family. They bow to the system. Life seems to throw one obstacle after another in front of change, and the mind – some call it the ego – screams out in fear and anger that we dare not change, we can’t afford it, it is too dangerous, too uncertain, too expensive, too frightening.

Change is, I think, the beginning of awakening. I understand there is no path to a meaningful life that is easy, free of pain or fear, or lucky. There is nothing lucky about change, there is nothing lucky about a meaningful life. The wisest and most learned and grounded people will crash and burn sometimes, because life happens, and has little regard for our intentions and rationales.

I admire agents of change, people who change. To me they are heroic. They have confronted life and the shrouds of fear and confusion – I call them the smoke bombs of life  – that stymie and confuse us. People who change are touched by angels, a special tribe. They will know great joy and meaning, and they will know the crown of thorns that come along.