Are You SURE You Don't Like Change?

How often have we heard it, thought it, said it, recognized it: "I don't like change." You can even tell some people that you do like change and they don't believe you, maybe because they don't want to believe you've somehow conquered this bugaboo that they haven't. And while it's true that change for the sake of change isn't always best, that constant overwhelming change can turn practical daily life into chaos, and that routines and tradition-building have their place (especially in the lives of kids and kitty-cats :)), change is good. I like change because: (1) "If you keep doing what you're doing, you'll keep getting what you're getting." How many of us think certain aspects of life couldn't be improved? Without changing what we're doing, that thinking is only wishful thinking. (2) When you stop changing, you start getting old. One of the most concrete (if not necessarily the most important) signs of this is a person's refusal to learn new technology. Not that one has to or should buy every new gadget that comes along, but when a major shift in how a task is handled or a goal reached comes along, and someone in effect says, "That's it, no more, I'm not going there," they've begun the process of opting out and making themselves obsolete. (3) I love to learn, and the essence of learning is change. Think about it. If you truly learn something, the very least you do with it is admit that piece of information into your knowledge base. That's change -- your knowledge base now contains something new. And with most learning, the change is more extensive than that. "I don't like change" = "I don't like to learn." Horrors.

Maybe another reason I like change is because I write fiction and in a successful story characters have to change. But not just any change will do. How do we create meaningful, believable change for our protagonist, as opposed to change that doesn't ring true because it seems to be what the plot needs (never mind if it suits the character), what the particular genre requires (a happy ending for a romance, say), what we've determined from the beginning is the proper moral or religious stand, or what we ourselves want to shoehorn in? I do it by asking myself what the character has learned. Not that you want your story to preach or teach some big lesson, but certainly the character has learned something, made some kind of adjustment, no matter how subtle, to the events of the story. That is the change to bring out in your ending, the change that's true to the character, and the change that will suggest your theme.