• The weather
• Business
• Relationships
• Fashion
• Popular Culture
• Political Leanings
• Favorite Colors
• Favorite Pets

Of course this list can go on and on.  I'm sure you can make some real insightful additions to it.  But the point I'm trying to make is that we know, with certainty, that things change.  They always have and they always will.

So with this in mind I'm going to ask the question again, "Why do people get upset when change happens?"

Becasue.......

People really don't get too bent out of shape when change happens to you or me.  They only start fidgeting when change is happening to them.  People do not like uncertainty. Change brings uncertainty by the bucket load.

Change is happening all of the time all around us.  But do we really see change for what it is or do we try and explain change away as something else?

I am writing this post on Sunday May 11, 2008.  It is springtime and the weather is just perfect in Las Vegas.  But you know what?  In another week or two it is going to get god awful hot here.  The temperature will get over 100 degrees and the sun will beat down relentlessly on the desert.  The seasons change and with them the weather changes.  Is there anything to panic about because the seasons change?

Business changes.  I'm not sure about the exact number but I believe that about half the companies that were on the Fortune 500 list, when it first came out, are no longer in business.  Companies come and go and with them jobs and come and go.  Is there anything to panic about because a business ceases operation and a new one takes it place?

Fashion changes every 6 moths.  Sometimes more often.  People just went out a few months ago and spent a lot of their hard earned money on the latest fashions and now they are all out of date.  Is there anything to panic about because fashion changes?

Lets's backtrack for a moment:

Seasons change:  They just do.  It has nothing to do with global warming, a conspiracy, the galaxy collapsing on itself, or any other argument that countless people are coming up with on a daily basis.

Business changes:  The company that made buggy whips went out of business.  Polaroid no longer makes cameras that take instant pictures.  The Edsel was a flop and pulled from the market.  Some companies and products stick around for a long time and other don't.  No conspiracy, no new world order, no secret society pulling the world's strings.

The following excerpt is from a comment left at the blog Carpe Diem:

I watched some repair work at my neighbor's house. He got a new lateral, lucky guy.

Three guys showed up in the morning with an excavator and trenched out forty feet long by nine feet deep from his house to the street. They replaced the lateral and filled in the trench. They did all that in one day and I thought, "What a country."

The downside is that the Ditch Diggers Union failed to stop the adoption of excavators. A job like this would have kept ten men working for three or four days digging that trench by hand with shovels. All those good ditch digging jobs have been lost. Tragedy.

Even today, we see legions of unemployed ditch diggers standing around street corners leaning on their shovels, put out of work by technology. You say we don't see that? Oh, never mind. I guess they found other jobs and their kids found other careers.

Resistance to change is a sure way to stop things from getting better. 

Change happens.  

Once there was an Ice Age.  Most of the world was covered with a sheet of ice.  Then the world warmed up (change) and the ice receded to the vicinity of the north and south poles.  No conspiracy, no human intervention, no green house gases, no nothing.  Change happens.  Nothing ever stays the same for ever.

You can argue to you are blue in the face.  But you will not stop things from changing.  Don't make believe you have figured out what went wrong when something changes.  Most likely nothing went wrong.  It was time for a change.

Embrace change because you can't stop it.

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