When someone would say to me, you have changed, my immediate feeling was a need to refute their observation. To be discovered to have changed often sounded like an accusation. I suspect this sentiment owes much to my Ghanaian upbringing, where it is rare for one to make the exclamation, “Eh, you’ve changed-oo!” as a form of compliment. It was thus difficult to think to accept the description to myself from a non-defensive position. I suppose I imagined myself as some sort of stone, of incredible immutable constitution, thus ever unfaltering. But even diamonds alter––they are the result of severe changes made through a significant measure of time. Having arrived at the belief that you do not know yourself, you grow roots in a transitioning perception that your sense of self is like your views on the sea, incoherent. It means therefore that you will be surprising yourself daily: for you do not know, fully, what you are capable of. But does one really feel surprise when one starts to learn to expect everything? I think yes; to know something to be possible and to find oneself in the web of its experience is not the same thing. Knowledge is not wisdom. When one begins to understand that the nature of things is change, and one begins to look on this attribute of life favorably, one becomes more natural, more “unrefined.” You no longer feel you ought to quarrel with the rain, when it is more pleasing to play in it. You begin to see the lessons in evolving; in not thinking that all that there is and all that there will be is a simple, limited perspective. You calmly expect and accept the unfortunate and you begin to read that not only is a nightmare interesting in of itself, but also possibly, that which makes a fairytale believable.
When last I wrote here an opinion on change, I also held the notion that an individual could not affect the world much, a view I no longer subscribe to. So my thinking, in someways, have changed since I last wrote on the topic. A recent talk with a workmate encouraged me to dig out the diary I kept at 19. I was curious to recall the sort of person I was at that final teen age. Reading my very very dramatized entries on what I dignified significant and silly was often laughable. The verses and lyrics, which I had penned down every few pages, were quite awful, and very embarrassing. It was not difficult to see that I have changed: not entirely for the better and not entirely for the worse. But the seams of what I have now become were traceable in those pages.
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