The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
-- Marcel Proust
If you want to change, you have to see things differently.
In order to see things differently, you have to see different things.
And to see different things, you have to put yourself in different places, where you can see things you don’t normally see.
This will expand your vision.
Unless you don’t want to change….
But, that may be a bigger problem than you think because life is changing, with or without you. It is not a fixed thing; it is dynamic—always moving, evolving...changing.
An example; you are not the same as you were 30 years ago, or even 10 years ago. For one thing, you are getting older. You are physically changing. Hopefully, you are also becoming more mature, too; even wiser.
Some of this change, wasn't appropriate when you were younger. But, now it is. In fact, it is necessary. We refer to this as growth.
After all, you get weirder and weirder if you try to act like you did in high school. It is not only unbefitting, it is damaging to those around you. This is true physically, but also emotionally, psychologically, spiritually. In fact, all of these (and other) dimensions are working together, to the benefit (or neglect) of the other.
And, to the degree that this is true individually, it is also true collectively. We can't continue to think together, like we 'used to'—when things like women's rights, slavery, and rapacious consumption of the earth with no regard for things like pollution were the norm. That was a bad norm. But, we had to recognize it first and then we had to learn how to deal with it.
This dynamic is not over, just because we did it once about this or that topic. It is the nature of our existence. We have the opportunity to learn from our mistakes—collectively and individually—if we choose to.
If we don't acknowledge this, though, we perpetuate the damage caused by our immaturity, insensitivity, neglect, lack of insight.
This is why this Baldwin observation about change is so true—devastating if we don't, liberating if we do.
Give us new eyes.
