Building the new

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” Socrates

Too often during seasons of change, I focus on the negative (shocker). I focus on what I hate about the new situation, how much I dislike the work involved getting to the new situation, all of the stress I feel, etc.

This thought process understandably makes me dread change. I’ve experienced a lot of change in my life to this point. I’ve moved at least 12 times …and I’m about to move again. I’ve been married, had children, lost family members, switched jobs, started exercise regimens, quit, started new diet programs…and quit, so forth, and so on.

I’m very sure I’m not the only one who has gone through some or all of this change. It’s called life. Life isn’t guaranteed to be a cake walk; in fact, it is pretty much guaranteed not to be. The difference between people who are resilient and people who are not lies in how they handle what life throws at them.

I think Socrates had it right. When we focus on the past…what we lose, what is different, what once was…we lose our resilience. We get stuck. When we shift focus to how we can build the new or what positive thing can emerge from the process, we can move forward and make the change a positive process. Because we don’t know the future. We create it. Our actions today create our future tomorrow.

Let’s build a future we can be proud of. Let’s look back a year, or two years, or five years from now and be proud of the decisions we made today. I know I will be more proud of decisions I made to build the future instead of fighting to keep the status quo, so that is what I am going to continue to do.

Some days will be better than others, but I hope to look back a year from now and be proud of how far I’ve come in this season of multiple changes.