Nothing’s Happening!

The Natural Pace of Change

(Photo by Katie Moum on Unsplash)

This spring we’re exploring the change process through an ongoing series of posts.  This week I share about how long transformation actually takes. Each phase of change has it’s own pace.

The timing of change is not what your mind will want. 

Your mind will want change to happen in measurable increments, perfectly divided into succinct periods.  It will want change to be quick and tidy, here for an instant then finished.  Your mind will want speed.  It will want the efficiency of a machine.

A Natural Process

But change is a natural process.  And Nature, as you know, moves at her own pace.

She tends to linger; to deepen and savor.  She moves in the slowness of eons, ice ages, and the birth and death of galaxies.  She does not mind millennia dedicated to carving a canyon into the face of the Earth.

Nature need not trouble herself about the pace of your transformation.  She knows your process will move through it’s phases in it’s own time, natural time.

Slow Change

It is slow.  Slower than that.  Creepingly slow.   At times change’s progress is nearly imperceptible.  Your mind will wonder if anything is happening.  Surely the misery of before times is better than this nowhere space.  

Maddeningly, there’s nothing you can do to force the timing.  Only LET GO and trust.  Grasping at anything will only drag the process out longer.

Then: Insight! Opening! Crack!  The iceberg breaks from the glacier and falls into the sea.  At times change happens in sudden, abrupt, quickening forward motion.  Unexpected as it is.. GO with it, keep pace as best you can.  It’ll slow back to a crawl soon enough.

Trust your Timing

Remember butterfly? She will spend longer than seems possible climbing free from her cocoon.  Even longer she will wait and rest, allowing her wings to dry. 

Wait out the slow times she says.  Patience.  Patience.

Because in an instant weak wet wings are suddenly strong and dry.   Then.  FLIGHT!