Fresh Ideas Friday: On change

Fresh Ideas Friday: On change

This photograph shows the last section of ditch remaining on my dad’s old farmland, now the Calico Skies subdivision. The rest, including the ditches that once outlined my parents’ property, have been obliterated.

IT’s been ten years since this earthen cavity carried any water. The changes to the land surrounding my family’s homse have been sudden, drastic, and dramatic, especially by once-rural Idaho’s standards.

But I remember how it was. I remember the smell of dew on barley waking me up late on warm summer mornings. I remember the bright tulip blossoms on the long-destroyed ditchbank. I remember irrigating, riding w/ my dad on four-wheelers while placing down tubes and pipes to draw water onto the land. There’s a magic in the sound of sprinkler spray and gurglins iphon tubes, especially in this tepid sem-desert where the water is crucial for growing life. At least, life as us European-descended people understand it.

I’ve found, of late, a certain overwhelming sadness considering these memories. At times, I’m absorbed into a dolorous reverie that I can’t seem to escape.

These memories are especially pronounced when I consider what I neglected to appreciate at that time. The same time dad sold the farm I discovered a cozy little copse on the west edge of the field, on the banks of Sand Creek. Just as my fantasies of campouts, firepits and tree-forts began, the opportunity to make them happen ended. Same goes for the bike jumps in my grandpa’s field across the road, now leveled and paved over. Same for the fish pond, covered in grass and cut off from access by some backyard fence. There’s the potato cellar turned junk pit I was too afraid to explore, now covered by my dad’s golf green. What wonders my schoolboy self might have uncovered had I taken the leap and tried!

It’s painful to relive these memories in the light of “what once was” and “It might have been.” They are sapping sentiments if allowed to linger for long, as addictive as they are painful. The mind seems to yearn unendingly for the only resolution that seems to matter: to go back. To make it like it once was, to bring back the greatness and happiness of the past.

And guys. Let’s be honest. It’s total bullcrap,

Irrigating? It SUCKS. Stuck outside all day, sun beating down, wind chapping lips, no electronics? No thanks. Yeah, I never explored, but I also never stepped on glass or broke a bone or fell out of a tree. As much fun as such trauma sounds, I’m glad I have no memory of the kind of pain.

I’ve discovered it’s important to keep a crystal clear, helicopter perspective on change. Frankly there’s very little that doesn’t change. Memory is tricky and easy to deceive. The past is hazy and the future as yet uncreated; I have not made tomorrow’s choices. People, societies, friendships, opinions, emotions, situations and circumstances all shift and change. Living 500 feet from where I grew up provides a dynamic and rich lesson in the nature of such change. Yes, the field no longer exists, but now I have a set of memories with neighbors I couldn’t’ve enjoyed otherwise.

What doesn’t change: Christ, and His yearning willingness to bless us in accordance with our faith. What doesn’t change are the laws and principles that govern human happiness: love and mature coping trend towards health and long life, for example. What doesn’t change is our infinite worth and value as human beings. We matter. These do not change. They are internal realities, not tied to external ones.

This same lesson applies to what I can control. I can influence certain things, but most of the changes that have occurred, have occurred far outside the realm of my ability to prevent or encourage. All that I can control are my beliefs and perceptions and the results that stem from them. Save for disabling disaster that might take away my higher cognitive processes, my own self is ultimately the only thing I can truly control.

So I have to remember, when the times come that I yearn for my boyhood, or high school friendships, or whatever other fantasy that seems better than the present reality: none of this is permanent. It will change. I cannot control or prevent that change. I can only control myself, and learn the lessons that such changes invite.