Accepting Change Gracefully

Is accepting change gracefully always about aging? Children don’t accept change gracefully, they long for it! At what point do we decide we don’t want change to happen anymore?

Jay and I were recently in discussions with our son, Neil, over his, I guess its graduate work now that he’s doing. He wanted someone to bounce off concepts he’d accumulated for his research on anti neutrino flux for his upcoming presentation to his colleagues. First I want to say that even though I had no idea what he was talking about, we could actually pick apart his presentation. But what was running through my head was, what will our conversations be like when he’s nearing the end of his PhD program? It struck me that we’re going to be the ones talked down to, like children. We’re the ones that will need to have simplified language, so we can be included in the conversation. We’re the ones that will gaze in awe at the grown-ups, trying to gleam a bit of information that we can understand.

With our daughter, Valery, I always feel ‘out of the loop’ when I try to talk about current culture… music and movies and the young stars in them. I can’t remember all of the names anymore! She has a tumbler page with people I’ve never seen talking about things I’ve never heard about. When Neil and Valery talk to each other, I rarely comprehend all of what their saying about this person and that.

When did this all happen? When did I suddenly become old news? I’ve always heard that roles reverse, that we start out training and educating our children and that they end up taking care of us. Lately I’ve been picturing us in diapers and being pushed around in a wheelchair… it’s not a pretty sight!

With technology advancing at alarming rates, I know it’s often hard to keep up with even the few programs that I use. And now there are apps for everything! I can appreciate that many of the tools in use today seem like a George Jetson cartoon (I’ve just aged myself again), something that seems like it belongs in the future. We can’t stop technology from advancing. We may not understand all of it; but, if we want to relate to our grandchildren, we need to have some kind of understanding.

Since we’re turning into the kids now, in a sense, maybe it’s time we started to play a bit. Look at technology as fun and experiment with it. I know I’m pushing some of the women on the board further than they want to go with technology, and they think I’m an expert! Maybe together we can muddle through all of this and have fun trying.

Shabbat Shalom,

Terri =]