“Americans vote for Change” is the headline since Barack Obama made history last week. Which got me thinking. Just in my lifetime I have seen the arrival of the internet and mobile phones (even my ten year old has one), of a female Prime Minister in Britain (although I would like to distance myself from that “achievement”!) of a War on Terror and so called “global threats”. I have seen the IRA murder innocents in my country and I have seen too the conflict in Northern Ireland come to rest. My former flat mate used to keep a crumbling piece of the Berlin Wall in his bedside table and I have my own wonderful memory of myself, heavily pregnant, queuing in Trafalgar Square outside the South African Embassy together with the voters who delivered the first black President of South Africa (hahaha - my former father-in-law had said “thet will never hapin”).
But on a minute level change is a part of life, part of every moment. When I look out of the window across the road to the public house and the trees beyond glowing orange in the autumn sunshine, I do not see a static, dead world. I see a world where leaves are growing (or falling), grass is moving, wind and elements eroding paint from the pub wall, the car parked on the drive is very slowly corroding, and Steve, the pub landlord is becoming older (whether he likes it or not).
Life is a fluid thing, and how we are influenced and what we believe as we go through life changes along the way. I used to not like olives, I used to think the military was quite sexy, I used to only wear black, I used to be pretty intolerant of religion. What interests me is not change, but a global shift of consciousness – which is what I think this Obama fellow is all about.
Change is inevitable. It is The Shift which is remarkable. So be part of it.
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