Every Day is the End of the World As You Know It

Every day is the end of the world as you know it. Every day is the beginning of a brand new world to discover.

This thought hit me yesterday afternoon and I haven't been able to get it out of my mind.  When I was young, I flowed with change like it was water.  I loved change.  In many ways I still do.  But as I get older, I find that change makes me nervous.  Endings make me unusually sad.  Somewhere along the way, I lost track of the fact that endings are normal; they, too, are good.  Without endings, there can be no beginnings.  Life is movement and movement requires change.  If you're fighting change, you're fighting life.  Irony of ironies that rejecting change is, in a way, embracing death.

Sometimes I think that I fear change because it frustrates my attempts to control my life.  As a young man, it was a foregone conclusion that I had little or no control over my life.  However, as this abhorrent thing called "maturity" has descended upon me, it has brought with it the vain illusion - a strange delusion - that I can control things in my life.  Events. Consequences. People. Fate.

It's a lie.  You cannot control things.  You cannot control people.  You cannot control the future.  It is the pulling of a strand on a sweater.  The more you pull, the more the thing unravels.  Stop it.  It is futile.  It is wrong.  Stare into the unblinking eye of the universe and scream.  Stare into the face of God and accuse.  You will not stop the machinery of time and change.  You will be ground to powder.  For dust you are, and to dust you will return.

Be still.  The God who formed the stars and hurled them into the darkness, formed you from the dust of their dissolution.  In every death there is the promise of life, if you embrace it in faith and hope.  In every ending, the promise of beginning.  Children will grow up.  Relationships will move on.  Chapters, like songs, will end.  Suns will set.  But fear not, child, they will rise again.