REsources for Living
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I can well remember from my childhood that most adults had a very strange habit. Pretty much any time you saw one of your parents’ friends, or an out-of-town relative, they would greet you in exactly the same way…
“Wow, you’ve grown!” they would declare in astonishment. “You look so different than last time I saw you!” And I would think, although I was much too shy to even consider saying it: Well, yeah. Go figure. Last time you saw me I was three. Now I’m eight. Did you think I was going to look exactly the same?
Of course children grow up. That’s basically their job. When my daughter was four or five she used to greet each day with the declaration: “I got bigger overnight!” And she did, although you might not see it, morning by morning. But you sure could see it from month to month, and from year to year the changes were pretty dramatic, as they are with all children.
And so I am now one of those horrible adults who sees my 11-year-old niece for the first time in a couple of years and thinks How could you possibly be so tall? Worse yet, kids who I remember as seven- and eight-year-olds from church are now on Facebook with pictures of their apartments or even their babies. Their babies! How did that happen?
Somehow these kids, while I wasn’t even looking, turned into grown-ups, doing grown-up things with their grown-up lives. And really, although on some level I find it shocking, I also know that this is what people do. They grow up. They transform. They change, not just a little, but completely.
Transformation, you see, is more than change. Any conversation we have or book we read or trip we go on might change us a bit, give us a new way to see the world. But transformation means turning from one thing into another, as dramatic as a caterpillar turning into a butterfly.
Here’s the part we forget. We find it remarkable that caterpillars turn into butterflies, but really, the transformation from a drooling baby to an adult who can skillfully operate heavy machinery is just as amazing. But caterpillars tuck themselves into a cocoon for their transformation, so when they emerge from hiding the change seems like magic.
People transform more slowly, and they do it out in public, so if you’re around for the whole show like parents are, then each morning-by-morning change isn’t all that surprising. I’m sure every parent has moments of shock when their baby is ready to ride a bike or go to college or hike in Tibet. But really, mostly bit by bit what you see is change, not transformation.
It’s only when you take a step back that you see what a huge thing all those little changes add up to. The nieces and nephews that we only see on occasion or our friends’ children who we only catch sight of rarely are the ones who shock us into recognizing how transformation most often happens. When we see at once the result of all those gradual changes, we remember that big transformations are almost always the sum of a whole bunch of little changes.
There’s a story—a true story—that has been making its way around the Internet lately about a man who transformed a barren sandbar in the Assam region of India into a lush forest. At age 16 he was so saddened by the sight of a bunch of snakes that had been washed onto the sandbar in a flood and then died from being out in the heat with no tree cover that he decided to do something. So Jadav “Molai” Payeng started planting seeds. And he kept at it. By hand. One seed at a time.
Now, says an article in the Huffington Post, “that once-barren sandbar is a sprawling 1,360 acre forest, home to several thousands of varieties of trees and an astounding diversity of wildlife—including birds, deer, apes, rhino, elephants and even tigers.”
Molai Payeng is now 47. He’s still caring for the forest, which people call the Molai woods. He didn’t just change that sandbar, he transformed it, utterly and completely. But he did it over 30 years, seed by seed.
Children transform as a matter of course, just by doing what children do. Adults have to try a little harder. Adults aiming for transformation have to choose a course, and decide to make little changes over and over again. It doesn’t always happen, but sometimes it does. I have a friend who decided to change her life, lost 100 pounds and now is a competitive pole dancer. I know someone who used get anxious just leaving the house who now does public speaking. They didn’t transform overnight, but they did transform, step by step, seed by seed. Perhaps, even now, it is happening to you.
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