The Importance of Change
Written for global sustainable fashion brand Maggie Marilyn’s online Journal in 2021
Change is one of nature’s oldest rules.
Fourteen billion years ago, change is what led matter and energy to coalesce into complex structures called atoms. Ten billion years later change is what spurred the combining of molecules into intricate structures creating organisms - the beginning of life on earth. Seventy thousand years ago, Homo Sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures, cultures. Fast forward to the ‘modern’ world and change is what spurred the agricultural, scientific, and industrial revolutions and can be almost entirely credited for the way we live today. So why then, if change is the very foundation of modern life, and indeed all life, do we so often feel like it is ripping the rug out from beneath our feet?
Consistency gives us the illusion that we are in control. But in reality, it just harbours a kind of complacency that leaves us stagnant. A slimy pond instead of a flowing river. Unfortunately, our current landscape is filled with complacency, whether in our business or personal life, or more jarringly on the climate front. But as history can attest, any unwillingness to change is virtually the signing of one’s own death sentence, the relegation of oneself to extinction. Only those that dance on the fringe of an ecosystem, constantly evolving and adapting, acting with a sense of urgency, are able to survive. Like the Haast eagle that was not able to adapt to its changing environment, those that continue to do things conventionally will be doomed if they are unable to keep up with changing environments. Whether they go extinct through their own misdeeds, or the catastrophic events the climate crisis is sure to inflict, the one constant variable will be their resistance to change.
So often, the weight of the climate fight is put in the hands of the government. The argument being that one person can’t make any real lasting impact. But if you want to change governments, then you have to change corporations, and if you want to change corporations then you have to change consumers. Does this mean change is easy? Of course not. It’s almost always hard and messy and uncomfortable. It can feel like taking one step forward and two steps back. But just like the moth that decided to break the rules of its species and search for food in the daylight, now known as the butterfly; or the vertebrates that took the skies to avoid predators some 230 million years ago, now known as birds, we too are going to have to take a risk, break the rules and make the leap in order to fly.
Because the truth is, the only constant in life is change. And if one bang, one shaking of the cosmos, some 14 billion years ago was able to change everything, imagine what 7.6 billion bangs could change? Once again that familiar face of change is on our doorstep as we welcome a new season, and just as we don’t mourn the loss of winter but rather see the energies from its rains transferred into the new blossoms of spring, we too must transfer our energies from comfortability in complacency to growth in continuous change if we are to see our fullest potential bloom.