Change

 

   It’s that time of year again when most people are considering the change from summer to fall.  The days are becoming shorter and you can begin to feel the body trying to adjust to the sun coming up later and sinking over the horizon sooner that it had been doing. 

     Most people look forward to this time when the air becomes crisp and there begins to be just a bit of a nip on the nose letting you know that probably soon you will be needing to get out the coats and winter boots and you should be looking forward to having to scrape ice from your car windshield and remove snow from your driveway.  Yet, there are some who would rather it stay warmer for a little longer and are not just yet ready to make these changes.  But the changes will come none the less.

     And it will be soon that the evitable controversy over the changing of the time clocks will once again become the topic of conversation.  Move it back --- move it forward --- leave it where it is!  It happens every time during those changing seasons.  That debate will probably never be brought to an end.  If ANY type of solution is reached it will not be agreeable by everyone and so the argument will continue.

     However, change is not limited to just the seasons.  People change too!  And often it is those changes that affect others the greatest.  I’m not going to try within the limited confines of this blog post to mention all the people and all the changes that have taken place.  Not even in more recent times, but I will mention one that perhaps is very well known and has been a controversy to many peoples lives for a long time --- Dr. Spock!

     Now, before your eyebrows go up in disbelief (well, perhaps, ONE eyebrow)!  I am not talking about the green-blooded alien from Vulcan from Star Trek.  That was Mr. Spock.  I’m talking about Doctor Benjamin Spock (American pediatrician) whose book Baby and Child Care (1946), one of the best-selling volumes in history, and his other publications tried to help mothers realize that they knew more than they thought they did.

     In the 1960s and early 1970s his books were criticized for propagating permissiveness and an expectation of instant gratification which allegedly led young people to join the “New Left” and “Anti-Vietnam War” movements, although he personally denied this.  However, many of the opinions that he advocated within the pages of his books during the decades of his life, he later recanted for a change in his viewpoint.

     And you can probably think of others who have done such similar things within their lives.  However, we must realize that if we base our values on solid unchangeable principles there should be no need to waiver back and forth, as it were, between different opinions.  The problem we often have is where are we going to look to find that source of principles that we can base our trust upon.  The other problem is that we are always going to wonder if we have found that solid source or is there going to be a need to change?  The problem there is the fact that we’re only human! 

QUOTE TO CONSIDER

THOUGHTFUL GEM

"Stop worrying about what you are

and concentrate on changing to what you can be!"