“Things Can Change” –Natasha Richardson

Natasha Richardson’s life was a high profile one which ended in tragedy only recently. She is reputed to have said, “things can change,” and dramatically so, in response to husband Liam Neeson’s motorcycle accident in 1999, which rendered his role of Qui-Gon Jinn in Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace redundant. She faithfully nursed him back to health.

Things can change, indeed.

We never quite grasp this until it hits us. We expect life to be ‘just life,’ then it becomes different in a moment and is never quite the same again.

But, that’s the nature of life. It’s forever changing and morphing.

Until recently, the world was riding an economic boom; but all booms bust--history indicates this, and the busts always come to some extent, unexpectedly. (I recall meeting with a respected business colleague in August 2008 and suggesting to him that the boom could bust soon... he laughed at me!)

In the 1980s the big fear was the nuclear arms race. As a high school student I was afraid my future might be curtailed by a cataclysmic World War III. In the 1990s it was (and still is to a certain extent) AIDS, yet we hardly hear of it now. In the early 2000s it was terrorism. These days it’s Global Warming. What will it be in 2015?

When we cast a reflecting eye over the past ten years or so of our personal lives, and consider the change that’s come, we might be shocked at some of the things we’ve already dealt with, and how different life is now, and how that’s actually changed us; and whether we like this or not, it’s life.

Things do change, and at times, radically so.

People grow and move; their places of abode and vocations change; their expectations of life change; their needs of us change. Arrangements change, and sometimes without notice.

Expecting things to remain as they are always has a tinge of insanity about it. Yet, we do this, don’t we?

Then at other times we do seek change, perhaps because something’s not working, and then because we want it, we start to expect change, and when it doesn’t come, we’re disappointed; no small wonder.

When it comes to family, change is often unwelcome and even a wedding can bring some sense of tearing pain, notwithstanding the funeral. Over the course of a weekend, things can change. Monday’s different from the previous Friday, somehow.

Life is a tantalising mystery. All we can do is go with it, in good faith. We can choose to not take things for granted, because we never know when these things of value will be gone for good.

Copyright © 2009, S. J. Wickham. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.