Tidal Waves

Usually when you throw pebbles into water, you don't think about it changing the makeup of the water forever. When you see the ripples, you can count them until they become too small for the eye to see, but that doesn't mean that they stop. They keep going. They affect the flow of the water forever. For water is dynamic, always changing, ever moving.

Kind of like life and self are dynamic.

When things happen, we obviously notice the immediate outcomes and responses to them. But soon after that, after the experience stops being the forefront thing on our mind we often forget.

But just because we aren't paying attention, does that mean it stops affecting us?

I think when things happen, good or bad, they effect us far more than we know and in ways we may never know.

I was sitting with a friend yesterday and we started talking of old memories. He mentioned a concert he attended years ago with a girl he dated. He talked about how he really wanted to be at the concert and how she didn't, how that night became the beginning of the end for their relationship. And it was the end of their relationship that led him to marry one of my best friends and lead him to become one of my dearest friends. Someone who always speaks truth in my life and has profoundly affected who I am.

Its things like that concert experience that have such a ripple effect in ways we don't even notice.

One experience can change our perspecitive on one and that has the power to change our lives.

I think that is why its so dangerous to look back and wish to change things in our past. Because ultimately to change one thing, is to change everything.

If I were to go back and change some of the bad, some of the less than stellar moments I've had- that would change the ripple pattern of my life and therefore change who I am today in so many ways.

I don't know if this is a blog about change or a blog about how we are all connected and we may never know the effect some actions, people, experiences really have on our lives.

All I know is that there are moments, there are ripples that seem minor, but are actually lifechanging. There are decisions that change everything. There are moments in which you don't turn back from. And whether we realize it in that moment, the next day or five years from then, the power of that moment doesn't change and the effects on us don't dissapear.

Because even if we can't see the ripples that doesn't mean they aren't there. And just because you can't see a ripple anymore, doesn't mean that it won't eventually join in with another million ripples and form a tidal wave that changes the landscape of ourselves permanently.

(and sometimes tidal waves of change disguise themselves as ripples....)