Blog 2541 – 10.12.2022

Time For A Change?

Life is forever presenting us opportunities for change, but sadly too many of us live lives mostly just full of missed opportunities. The nosey oldster’s comment in the movie It’s A Wonderful Life, “Youth is wasted on the young” would seem an appropriate epitaph for such lives.

Instead of trying to change the world or others we could if we just let ourselves – be happy, be changed. Yesterday I watched again the first X-Men movie that was released in 2000. That was the year my mother took her own life, three years after my dad died of a heart attack or stroke. My parents had a big problem with change. My dad was an “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it guy.” (I have tried to learn from his example and to be an “If it ain’t broke try to make it better guy.” For all of my mother’s protests that she was nothing like my dad she was unwilling to even consider change and that was a bitter root that ruined so much of life for her. In the opening of that first X-men movie a voice over by Professor Xavier says regarding mutation, adaptation, change:

“It is how we have evolved from a single-called organism into the dominant species on the planet. This process is slow, and normally taking thousands and thousands of years. But every few hundred millennia, evolution leaps forward.”

Many people who seem to easily take so many things “on faith” find adaptation and change incredible to even consider. I grew up in a very narrow fundamentalist religious sect that claimed to be non-sectarian, but like so many other groups they believed themselves to be the “true” church of God. Most of those folks recognized no other translation of the Holy Bible than the King James Version with it’s dated thee(s), thou(s), and shalt not(s.) They were and still are oblivious to the countless revisions and changes that the KJV has gone through unannounced since it’s first printing in 1611. I saw a facsimile of the twenty-third Psalm once as it appeared in that first edition and it looked and read more like German than English.

The English language is ever evolving. One example: The Bible College I attended for three years justified its existence by quoting a verse from the KJV that reads, “Study to show thyself approved a workman unto God thoroughly equip unto every good work.” The word translated “study” actually at the time meant “work hard” as evidenced by the context (Actual study, as the word is understood today, would not prove you a workman but a student.) The meaning of the word study has changed over time as have the meanings of so many words.

One very haunting song from the soundtrack of the wonderful movie Forest Gump says, “Oh, Lord, I can’t change.” But we can and indeed we do. Fun fact: “Scientists say, that due to cell death and replacement we have virtually new bodies every ninety days. They used to call graduates of OCS (The Army’s Officer Training Corp that turning enlisted soldiers into second lieutenants) “ninety-day wonders.” It would seem that moniker applies to us all.

Like babies we all need a change from time to time preferably before we start to smell too bad. Instead of spending so much time and trouble trying to change the world or someone else let us look to the one thing the one person that we can change – ourself.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VlZZ_q6a3nfOWIl8PR_Qxe_hF2blBZh5/view?usp=drivesdk

The Times They Are A Changin’