Yearning for Change? Look to Nature

This season can tend to bring a lot of focus on change. Nature reflects this to us in her changing leaves, changing temperatures, and changing daylight hours. If you want to change something about yourself, you have to be acutely aware of it first. How do you move the boulder if you aren’t even conscious that the boulder exists? So instead of running away or ignoring that which gives you the most frustration and angst in your life, what happens if you acknowledge it? Consider it. Witness it. Allow it to take up some space and be. Then, you can more easily move it out of the way.

We all have a default mode. This is the way our brains orient in the world when we aren’t focused upon any one stimulus (we call this the Default Mode Network). The only way to create lasting change about how our minds orient in the world is to get really intentional about it. Learn about our default mode and recognize it when it comes out and takes the driver’s seat. Only then can you begin to manipulate it, reshape it, chisel away at it through a series of different choices, one by one, over a period of time, consistently. Until eventually, the new choice becomes the default mode and the default mode that once was, is not the unconscious go to.

Use this season to watch how nature gradually and intentionally changes her default mode, where her mornings are more crisp and her leaves shift colors gracefully until they organically fall. Changes like these don’t happen in one grand gesture, nor do our mindsets. The more we look to nature in a time of change, the more we may begin to learn about our own rhythms of change and move more harmoniously through them.