Do you welcome change or fear it? Do you wish everything would stay the same? Do you wish things would go back to the way they were years ago? If so, you probably aren’t experiencing the wonderful gift of life. You are merely failing to accept the inevitability of death.

I’m not a stranger to the fear of change. I was afraid to grow up and take responsibility for my life. I was addicted to alcohol for twenty years. I was miserable and suffering the wounds of misfortune. All of this occurred while I was an attorney working for my father, attempting to win his love. All I could think about was that if I could just be the person he wanted me to be, he’d take care of me as he did when I was a little boy.

During that time, I played the role of a husband and father, but I was an adolescent trapped inside the body of an adult. I was a deacon in the Southern Baptist Church, an adult Sunday school teacher, a model Christian. I lived the American dream: I was a rich professional with a successful law practice. I thought everything was as good as it could get in my life. But I was a secretly-unhappy, recovering alcoholic. When I tried to share my misery and pain, I was told, to one degree or another, that I was an ungrateful son of a bitch. No one believed I could be suffering because everyone thought I was living "the good life."

I may have appeared to be living the good life, but I knew that my life was going to come crashing down around me sooner than later. I was desperately unhappy in my second marriage. I was desperately unhappy in my career primarily because I wanted to do something else with my life. I knew that I had to make decisions that would alienate my family, my friends, everything that I knew. In short, I knew that my life was about to change.

We get sick, miserable, tired, and frustrated, and then we get stuck. We can heal or remain stuck in our disease. The choice is ours. Children grow up. The earth rotates on its axis. Air quality gets worse, lines get longer, waist sizes get bigger, and on and on. What you want today will not be your desire tomorrow. Another way to understand the paradigm is to realize that the object of your desire may stay the same, but your desire will change, and you won’t want it anymore. To complicate it further, often we passionately want something that we cannot have; and in the rare event that we get it, we no longer want it.

We’re constantly changing from one state of being to another. We’re on a journey, and frequently it’s not clear where we started or where we’re going. Even if we think that we’re standing still, we’re standing on the surface of a planet that’s rotating thousands of miles per hour, a planet that’s moving through space faster than any car, jet, or Jet Ski we’ve come up with to date. So you wouldn’t be able to stay in the same place or maintain the same circumstances even if that were your desire.