Changes a blow to resistors
This is Part One of a two part commentary.
There are some fleeting moments when I feel like Ida Lupino’s character in that memorable episode of The Twilight Zone … “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine.”
Originally airing Oct. 23, 1959, the episode featured Barbara Jean Trenton, Lupino’s character, who preferred her glory days as a movie star to what life was dealing her in the present. Her preference for that former life led her to watch her old movies incessantly. She resisted all attempts by those who knew her to get her to move on. A setup meeting with her former co-star went badly because she couldn’t accept how he’d aged. Things went downhill — or rather, further into the Twilight Zone — from there.
Not that I’m a played-out old movie star. I just sometimes feel overwhelmed, on a Barbara Jean Trenton-size scale, by … change.
Yep, change. That old friendfoe that can sometimes hammer us unmercifully, stress us out, send us scrambling, turn us into that light bulb-headed figure in Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream. Or, McCauley Culkin’s character in the movie Home Alone.
They say the more things change, the more they stay the same. Lately it seems that for every one thing that remains constant, at least five things change.
I sometimes wonder if it’s an age thing … as we get older, the world just appears to pass us by faster and faster until we can’t keep up with all the changes and then decide we don’t want to. (You know — “To heck with the latest dances, the Internet, smartphones, the yet-another social-media platform and fashionably holey skinny jeans.”)
When we think of people who resist change, our minds may go to those old racially biased terrorists of the Jim Crow era who didn’t want to see black folks advance. Those old misogynists who didn’t want to see women advance. Those members of the Good Ol’ Boys Club who resisted having their mutual back-scratching political/ social/financial deals disrupted and put to an end.
But then there are those changes we Average Joes find ourselves faced with.
The passing of the relative, the friend, the neighbor, the co-worker (such as my co-worker, the late Democrat-Gazette TV columnist Michael Storey) we thought would be here forever.
The elimination of a longtime perk or privilege, one we may have taken for granted. Many of us saw personal and professional perks go the way of the dodo bird when the economy tanked late last decade and have continued to experience more austere lifestyles as entire industries have suffered — and jobs have disappeared — due to today’s technology.
Something we of a certain age
can definitely relate to changing popular culture. We shake our heads over today’s popular music, even as we continue to wonder what the heck our parents and grandparents found wrong with our rock ’n’ roll.
They tell us that it’s not about the change, it’s about how we react to it. So, being in the grip of the aging process, trying to deny that we’re becoming our parents, those of us who would heed that admonition may scold ourselves for finding change unwelcome and do what we can to avoid becoming curmudgeons.
Ideally, we’ll remind ourselves of the overwhelmingly positive aspects of change. Subject as I am to agreeing when hearing the occasionally fellow middle-ager exclaim, “Getting old [is tough]!,” I have to remind myself that I wouldn’t want do-overs on childhood and young adulthood … even with the privilege of knowing then what I know now. I’ll deal with the creaks, the sometimes aches, the slower gait (OK, well, my gait was never fast) and the psychological, mental and emotional battle scars … once wounds, but now healed by faith, maturity and at least some wisdom.
This is Part One on change. At some point, I look to do a Part Two based on a book I’ve been urged to review:
Conquer Change and Win by Ralph Masengill. According to its news release the book “outlines an effective approach for understanding and managing the emotions of change to bring about positive personal and professional growth.”
In the meantime, I’ll get my hands off my cheeks and continue to stand firm through all life’s changes, good and bad. Hope you do the same.