Small Change

Gloria Sandford, LMHC

Small change is permanent change and the smaller the better. Small changes are the kind of adjustments that can be made in a doable way, modifications that feel natural and easy to slowly embrace as a part of normal experience. But that is not what we want. We are desperate for things to be different and we need them to be different right now. By the time we are out of denial enough to know how bad a problem is, we are clamoring for relief. Things didn’t get worse over night. It was a gradual shift into greater and greater difficulty but that doesn’t matter because the problem feels overwhelming and so the solution needs to feel big enough to address it. No small movement will satisfy because small change isn’t usually very visible. We want a big change that is obvious. Seeing is believing and we can’t feel better until we believe it will be better.  

But often the big, visible changes we make just don’t last. As a child one holiday season I remember my amazement when my mother brought home a kit to grow an Amaryllis. In just a couple days with a little bit of watering what looked like a completely dead plant transformed into a foot tall gorgeous flower sporting beautiful red blooms. I was transfixed. It was amazing! I looked and looked at that flower with such joy each time I passed by with a sense of increasing wonder. However, my bliss was short-lived. As soon as that plant sprouted up, it shrunk right back to being dead and dry. In contrast, my mom had a Christmas cactus that would bloom every year. It grew year by year though that wasn’t very obvious to me. I never marveled at its transformation but it was growing nonetheless. In fact, fifty years later it is still growing and blooming. Like plants, we grow day by day. Most progress is impossible to notice in the moment. Yet, if we are watering our life with care, we are always taking the next step of growth. Sometimes that next step is a big step like the bloom on my mom’s Christmas cactus, but it is just the next step. We can be filled with hope for transformation even in the hard times when we know that the small changes we make today are the changes that last.