The Paradox of Change: Celebration, Sorrow, and the Space Between

First of all, I'm sorry for not being consistent with this newsletter for the last couple of months. Life has been a rollercoaster ride lately.

This week, my sister got married to the love of her life. While we hear about people getting married every day, this one has been the second most important moment of my life. (The first one was when my baby brother was born).

I've never felt this magnitude of happiness and gratitude at once. Yet amid the joy, I found myself experiencing an unexpected undercurrent of sadness at the thought of not having her around all the time.

This collision of emotions stirred something deeper in me and I have this one recurring thought:

Beginnings and endings are just perceptions. Underneath them, there's just change independent of any emotions or qualities of goodness or badness to it.

This wedding, like all significant life events, isn't simply a happy occasion or a sad one. It's a point of transformation where multiple truths exist simultaneously: the celebration of union, the mourning of separation, anticipation of new family dynamics, and nostalgia for what came before.

Human experience resists categorization. Our emotions aren't binary states of happiness or sadness, but multidimensional landscapes where joy, sorrow, longing, and gratitude coexist. Yet we often struggle to hold these contradictions, preferring instead to label experiences as either "good" or "bad."

The Consciousness of Change

While my sister moving out after her marriage is a very different context, it makes me reflect on all the times I lost something and felt sad. Could I have looked at it all as a new beginning and celebrated it instead?

Is there a possibility that I could have celebrated my grandfather’s passing because it probably meant starting of an afterlife for him? Could I have been happy about losing the friend I thought would be around for the rest of my life because it meant learning how to navigate melancholy for me? What if I had celebrated all my failures because they opened new doors for me?

This reminds me of the Buddhist concept of Anicca (impermanence) which states everything is in constant flux. Our world is made up of countless independent atomic moments succeeding each other. Our consciousness might simply be the awareness of this constant change.

When we resist the impermanence built into existence, we create our own suffering. When we embrace it, we might find freedom.

The Paradox of Human Nature

There's a fascinating contradiction in human nature. We are drawn to novelty and new experiences. Yet simultaneously, we crave stability and familiarity.

We seek new experiences while clinging to comfortable routines. We dream of transformation while fearing its consequences.

This brings me to a question that has been haunting me lately:

Why does our need for familiarity keep us stuck in old habits, environments, and relationships that no longer serve us?

I've watched friends remain in unfulfilling jobs and relationships far beyond their expiration date. I've caught myself repeating patterns I've outgrown. We build psychological prisons where we become our own guards, policing our experiences according to outdated rules we never consciously chose.

When change is the only constant in life, why do we run from it with such determination?

Finding Wisdom in the Empty Spaces

Perhaps the answer lies not in better understanding our emotions about change, but in learning to experience the change itself. Perhaps the answer lies in the empty space between moments where transformation happens.

In music, the silence between notes is as important as the notes themselves. Without these pauses, we would hear only noise. Similarly, maybe the transitions between life's chapters like the weddings, the losses, the moves, and the milestones aren't merely bridges to cross but spaces to inhabit.

What if we simply experienced change as it came? What if we treated each transition as neither beginning nor end, but simply as the next frame in the continuous film of our existence?

What is it that makes us more human? Our ability to experience something or have an emotional reaction to it?

Everything changes. So why do we focus on experiencing the moments in a state of flux and not the emptiness between them?

Why are we the way we are? If this is the fundamental nature of being a human, then where is it leading us? What is its purpose? What is the purpose of the curiosity I’m feeling right now?

Why am I feeling this awakening but also feeling lost at the same time?

As I move forward from my sister's wedding, I'm attempting to dwell less on what's ending or beginning, and more on the sacred space of change itself. And I'd love to hear your thoughts.

How do you experience moments of transition in your life? Do you find yourself resisting change or embracing it? And have you ever found unexpected beauty in the space between endings and beginnings?