change, and the eternal challenge

what is the toughest challenge you have ever undertaken in your life? given an exam? finished a job? overcame some difficulty? how about change, have you ever tried to change?

recently, a few little snowballs in my life that had been rolling for some time, all merged together as they approached me, forming a giant avalanche.. an avalanche that engulfed me, and left me floundering, gasping for breath, wondering if i could go on. thankfully, sheer belief in something that i treasured, and someone that i valued, helped me get beyond that phase. and as i stand here, dusting myself off, i am thinking and living in a world of change.

as an engineer, i have been trained to approach problems from first principles. so i started with change, what is change? the psychology folks tell me that change is learning, and the process of learning never ends. some part of our behaviour, what we do, is inherited, but the rest we absorb by learning. we learn good things, and we learn bad things. things that we learn can be unlearned, then why not bad behaviour as well? and therein lies the eternal challenge.

one of the first things i read when i embarked on this journey was that procrastination is the biggest enemy of change. not surprisingly, the biggest procrastinators are also the people least likely to change. the key word here is motivation. how strong is your motivation? it goes without saying that if your motivation is not strong enough, you will not change. most of us test the limits, wondering how much longer we can keep things going without making that big step, the big 'C' word.. change.

something had to give, and when it gave, it jolted me big time. shook me out of my dreamy reverie, and off this lofty perch i had assigned myself. the line between sheer arrogance and self-confidence is very narrow. i crossed that line so long ago that it was a dot on the horizon in my rear-view mirror. not any more. i have made that U-turn, and i'm headed back into the light. now to see what change will bring.

i apologize to any one i have rubbed the wrong way. it's the least i can do to make up for stuff i did or said in the past.

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