By Jason Dagenhart
Round Table reporter
Change; it’s all around us. It is as constant as the earth we stand on. It happens everywhere, everyday, to everybody, and there is nothing we can do about it. We see it biologically, with the “evolution” of species, or more like just plain adaptation. We see it psychologically, with the differences in human cognitive reasoning that have been happening as we turn into a more constant race. We see it technologically, with the drastic steps that have been taken in the evolution of how we create and impart our knowledge into the machines we are slowly becoming.
The atmosphere is changing, life as we know it changes every day. It’s like the flow of a waterfall: the water falls over the precipice into a magnificent pool of splendor and beauty, only to do so again later when it reaches another drop. Change emerges and falls over the human race with grace (sometimes being accepted with even less grace), and it flows through the earth until it covers it all and then it falls on its own when the change itself changes.
That is just the change that affects events globally. There are all sorts of types of changes, some small, and some large. All of the types have equal effects, though, because whether the change is big or small, it still affects someone the same way.
Why do we find such adversity to change? Why do we get so distressed when even the littlest things change? Coming from my point of view, I think it’s because, as humans, we don’t like having our surroundings transform into something else and having to adjust to something completely new. We are creatures of habit, so that means we do things like our morning rituals or how we act around others the same way over and over and over and when we have to change what we normally do it upsets our balance of normalcy and we try to fight back.
Say you have to change how you get up and get ready for the day. Instead of brushing your teeth, taking a shower, and going downstairs to eat, you have to do all those things out of order or maybe not do any of them at all. How different would that be? I for one would be kind of upset because it is so different from what I normally do day after day.
Instead of the little changes affecting us, there are the bigger changes that affect us just as thoroughly: The wars in the Middle East, the rising gas prices, the economic disaster, all of these concern every one of us. They force us to change not just our views of life but our attitudes towards others and the basic was we live. The war we have been in for more than ten years has affected the United States dearly. The war caused most of the rising gas prices that we are afflicted with right now and it is putting our government on the brink of economic shut down. Not only that but it has forced us to accept the deaths and the losses we have obtained in the war and it has pushed us into dire straights concerning if we should actually use our own cars instead of walking or biking.
I understand why change is so undesirable; it compels us to revise the very thinking we are so very used to having. We are all comfortable with what we normally do, so we don’t want to change it. But really some changes should be embraced and dealt with accordingly. We shouldn’t always be so closed-minded when concerning the changes we face, maybe some of them are for the better.
