Transformation

October 2020 

In the natural world, change does not knock. It arrives without ceremony, without prior arrangement. There are no manifestos, no declarations of intent. The seed splits in its darkness. The caterpillar dissolves into something it does not understand. The river alters its course without appeal or regret. Nothing is discussed. Nothing is postponed. The world moves because it must.

Nature, for all its mystery, does not pretend to be anything but itself. It does not rehearse. It does not seek improvement. The snake sheds its skin when the time comes. The leaf loosens its hold and drifts to the ground without protest. Even the volcano, in all its violence, does not justify its eruption. It does not apologise. In nature, there is no vanity. No comparison. The desert does not wish for rain when it knows only sand.

One could almost call it indifferent, if indifference didn’t imply a kind of emotional effort. But nature doesn't resist and it doesn't strive. It simply continues, undoing and remaking itself in a rhythm older than thought. That rhythm is not something it chose, it is something it is.

But we, the clever ones, the calculating ones, have forgotten this. We resist. We cling to who we think we are as if identity were a prize to be defended. We speak of growth, of transformation, of becoming better. We ask “how” as though there were a map to follow, a sequence to execute. But the question is already the misstep. There is no “how.” There never was.

Real change, the kind that leaves no one to take credit for it, begins where effort ends. It doesn’t arrive with applause or a new nameplate on the door. It arrives in the silence after striving has collapsed. It is not about becoming someone new. It is about seeing, perhaps for the first time, that there was nothing solid to begin with. Only masks. Only rehearsed roles.

People speak of reinvention, as if that were a noble project. But what they call change is often just costume. New language, new posture, same fear underneath. We do not want to transform. We want to improve our disguise.

Yet beneath the surface, always, something truer waits. Sometimes it shows itself in grief, or fatigue, or in the long quiet after failure. In those rare hours when the old identity no longer holds, and one stops pretending to be someone. There, in the absence, something begins.

It does not arrive with clarity or comfort. It is not an idea. It is not better. But it is honest. And honesty, for all its cost, is the first breath of something real.

The truth is, we do not fear change. We fear the death of what we’ve called ourselves. But all true change begins there, in that small death. In that unclenching. In that soft, almost unnoticed disappearance.