Change, Change, Change And More Changes: Fill & Download for Free

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to bloom.Anais NinEverything changes.Change is frightening because it means leaving a place where you feel safe to go to a place you are not familiar with.Even if the place where you are at no longer works, even if it does not make you happy, your instinct is to stay because the act of leaving is processed in your brain as danger.Change is natural, inevitable, necessary. We go through stages - some notable, some nearly invisible to anyone but ourselves - and each one implies a necessary evolution.Without it we stagnate and things that stagnate are not really alive.

When I was little, and a teen, I never considered myself beautiful. Mostly I thought I was OK, and felt diminished when I saw someone else that I deemed was more beautiful than me.Instead of feeling dazzled and rejoicing in someone else’s beauty, I felt their beauty somehow had an impact over mine.This is what’s so impoverishing about comparing yourself to others - it zaps the joy out of everything.Anyway. One day, when I was around 20, I saw a photo of me when I was around 14.It hit me like a freight train.Oh my god, I thought. I was beautiful. I was beautiful, and I didn’t know.I wasn’t beautiful like other people are beautiful, but I was in firm possession of my own kind of beauty.What a waste.With all my heart I wish I had known.That’s when it hit me: wait a minute. Ten years from now I will look at a photo of me now and wish someone had told me I was beautiful. I will desperately wish this was something I knew.It was like a message from future me, and it went clean into my heart.The near non-existent change I’ve ever made to my appearance was fully believing in my own beauty, and that has been for decades the biggest confidence boost.

The United States today is one of the longest running unchanged governments in the world; we’re governed by the same Constitution we developed more than two centuries ago, with some amendments. Though these amendments had enormous impacts, they didn’t revolutionize the way we actually govern our country. This is not true of the UK (which has evolved into a democracy during this time), France, (which has had so many revolutions, republiques, and monarchies in this period that I can’t count them easily), Spain, Italy, Germany, Russia, and Portugal. Canada wasn’t even an independent country when we got started; Mexico has had more change than continuity. Japan, Korea, China, Thailand.. change, change, change..So I think the answer might well be the U.S. If we’re not the oldest, we’re a contender.