Life is constantly moving, going, changing, and altering. Oftentimes, I find myself waiting. I wait for periods of calmness, periods of stability, periods where I feel like for once everything in my life will stop moving, changing, and altering. As nice as it sounds to feel like I could have a moment to catch my breath, appreciate my surroundings, and take a second to regroup, I am realizing more and more that these times of life are rare, if they even exist at all.

The moment we start to feel settled, even the smallest of changes can greatly alter our days or even the direction in which our entire lives are going. The second I graduated high school, I was preparing to move off to college. The second I moved off to college, I said “see you soon” to my lifelong friends, only to meet tons of new people. The second I felt like I made a stable group of friends, I had to say goodbye to them for a month over winter break. The second I finally felt settled at college, it was time to come home. The second I got used to living on my own, I had to learn how to live under my parents’ roof again for the summer. Everything is always changing. Life is a constant cycle-- always on the go and never stopping for anybody or anything. If even for brief moment my world feels calm, I know that something will happen to spice up my days. I will hear from someone I haven’t talked to in a long time, someone I love will get sick, I will have a new job or educational opportunity, I will meet someone new, I will be faced with a hard decision, or even I will decide to try something totally new. There are an endless number of things that can happen that contribute to the ever-changing nature of our lives.

I used to freak out about change. I feared change and desired everything to stay stable and routine for as long as it possibly could. I would go out of my way to make sure that everything remained orderly and free of chaos. When things would happen that disturbed the peaceful little world that I created for myself, I would go nuts. I would become anxious, stressed, and do everything in my power to make things go back to the way they used to be.

What I’ve learned is that as our lives evolve, we need to be evolving too. If we consistently believe that change is negative, harmful, and outright disruptive, then we will be living our lives as perpetually unhappy individuals. In times of difficult and unexpected change, it is okay to feel unsettled. However, we are called to have Hope and Trust that The Lord’s plan for our lives is thought out down to every tiny detail. We can feel comforted knowing that each change our lives bring is working together to paint beautiful pictures of our lives. One of the keys to experiencing true joy is to embrace change, evolve with our constantly moving lives, and know that everything will work out just as it should in the end.