July 05th, 2018

Someone in this household, who is not me,  head their hearing tested recently.    Tim's doctor thought it was a good idea since his shingles episode was not just on his face, neck and scalp but also on and in his right ear. (poor baby!)  Now that the rash is gone (though not the discomfort) he felt it was time to be sure that everything was okay.

It was a very good idea! I encouraged it heartily.  The man hasn't had his hearing checked since grade school!  As it turns out, everything was fine.  His hearing was mostly in the normal range with a little bit of loss in the very high ranges which is absolutely to be expected. He served in the military, enjoys target shooting, has done construction work, used power tools, done yard work all sorts of lawn equipment and of course, listened to VERY loud music.  All things that can be very negatively impactful on a persons hearing.   So what a relief, things are mostly very good and we will periodically check to make sure that it hasn't gotten any worse as time goes by. Yay!!

While I'm sure there was at least a little bit of trepidation on Tim's part, he completely open to the experience. He was fully prepared to address whatever the results turned out to be.  This man knows how to adapt to change.

Everyone does they just don't realize it.  Each of us has been adapting to change throughout our lives.   At some point we probably needed to get a new doctor, or hair dressers or move to a different school system.  It feels both the same and very different because there are so many  ways to do the exact same thing! Even going from elementary school to middle school is that weird almost a deja vu sort of feeling. For many kids it's the first time in their scholastic career that they move from classroom to classroom throughout the day.  But it's still a classroom, with a teacher, and levels of expectation and books and studying and tests.  Still each teacher teaches differently,  no two classroom are "decorated" the same way and on and on. It is a very good introduction into learning how to adapt to change.

Although if you think about it,  even before a child is in middle school there have been loads of adaptive behaviours. Think about it, the leap from being a precious though dampish blob of an infant who is utterly dependent on their parent for everything to a very mobile, talkative individual with an identity and personality unlike anyone else's who is able to cause destruction, create entire fantasy worlds, occasionally be helpful and express distinct opinions took a journey through hundreds of stages and changes.  And that is just in the first five years of life.  

So we all do it.  We adapt, we change, we grow all of the time. Without even realizing it.  So I am baffled when I hear someone say that "They want things to always remain the same" or they excuse someone else's resistance to something new which would improve their quality of life with "They don't like change".  It's ridiculous.   Nothing stays the same.  Every single day we slough off dead cells and grow new ones which means our body changes constantly.  Blood continually circulates. We age. We gain weight, we lose weight, we catch a cold, we need  new glasses; these are all changes!  Our brain changes too.  We are receiving new information constantly and we adapt to that so lightning fast that we are unaware it is going on. You hear something on television, or gossip through the neighborhood grapevine, you read some little tidbit that interests you in the newspaper or maybe in an email or an instagram post. Whatever it was, it was new information.  Your eyes and ears absorbed that information, your brain processed it and it produced a change and you adapted to it!

People crack me up.  Too funny.  When it's cold out, we dress warmly.  When it's hot out, we turn on the fan or air conditioner.  If we are hungry we eat.  If we are sick we do whatever we need to do to heal ourselves. In other words, we adapt to change.  All day, every day. 

Change isn't a bad word.  Different isn't a scary thing.  It's just an unfamiliar thing.  And the best way to make an unfamiliar thing, more familiar, is to embrace it.

Every time I've moved in my life, and that's a lot of moves, one of the first things I always did was to explore my new environment, get out there and learn it, get lost, wander around, see things, make it more familiar to me. I have always adapted more easily to change than most people I knew and I think I finally figured out why.

​Caterpillar to butterfly :)