Many, in fact, end up wishing that they hadn’t won at all, and that they could go back to how things were before. And yet many of those that do, report that they are no happier than they were before their worries were apparently ended. You say you don’t like change? Not many of us would turn down the opportunity of becoming an overnight millionaire. There is one change that many of us wish for every week – winning the lottery.
An apparently familiar environment from which a departed loved one is now absent, or where the pain of serious illness makes once simple tasks unbearably difficult, or where cherished belongings are sold to adjust to a new financial reality in the face of redundancy. When such change occurs we can be sent into a spin, unsure of the new shape that life will mould around us, unsure of our place within a once familiar environment that is now unalterably different.
Sometimes life happens, and it seems that everything we once knew has gone, and we know that nothing will ever, ever be the same again. And yet, despite the ever changing nature of life, many of us fear change and of making big decisions that we know will change our lives forever. We notice the change from last year’s photographs, amazed at just how much our children have grown, without us even noticing, and we wonder where our babies have gone. The thing with such changes is that they are so normal, so everyday, that they become almost imperceptible to us.Īs a parent, perhaps the most striking reminder of the imperceptible nature of change comes each year when we take delivery of the latest school photographs.
In truth, change is the one constant that can be guaranteed in life and everywhere we look we are reminded of this fact – night becomes day, winter becomes spring, today’s hottest property becomes tomorrow’s Z-list reality TV show fodder. (Can you imagine the graveyards of the future: ‘Here lies Marshall Braxton, loving father, son and Change Agent’ ‘Heath Lomas, dearly missed Relationship Manager’. In fact, somewhere along the way it seems that we became so rubbish at it that ‘Change Managers’ and ‘Change Agents’ (ahem, I shall bite my tongue, what with the theme of being positive and all) seem to have sprung up all over the place. Apparently we don’t do the change thing very well.