Changes

My high school science teacher, Mr. Charles Bennett, once said that the amount in which a person changes from the first grade to adolescence is equal to the amount of change you'll experience every decade of your life. I was incredulous and found this difficult to believe when I was sixteen. At that stage of my life, I thought I was blossoming into the kind of adult I was going to become and would maintain a steady course on a straight path throughout all my days. I could never have imagined all the changes that my life would bring.

After graduation, a whole new world opened up for me, as it does for most young women, in college, work, relationships, and self-exploration. By the age of 30, I had started a career, returned to graduate school to pursue another career, been married and divorced after seven years of matrimony, and had started to deeply examine my faith, world view, and relationships with friends and family. During my 30s and 40s, I tried out a variety of different paths. I lived in a log cabin on a farm with a small herd of polled Hereford beef cattle and Nubian milk goats. I read Sufi poems, Jungian psychology, and feminist literature. I had come from a conservative fundamentalist Kentucky family, and in some ways I felt like I didn't belong anymore.

As I approached the age of 50, I discovered that I didn't feel so far removed from my Appalachian roots after all. In a Buddhist meditation group last year, I realized that I'd forgiven the hurts and disappointments of my past. I learned to see my parents as people who were just doing the best they could, and I realized that I am a continuation of them. My past is a guide post but not a hitching post, and I create my world anew every day as I go along. That's my philosophy at my current stage of development.

I really couldn't have imagined how the world would change technologically as the decades unfold. In the 1990s, I was delighted by car phones, cordless phones, and cell phones. The new millenium brought online banking, laptop computers, and so many wonderful things that make my life easier. I think about my grandmother back home in the hills of eastern Kentucky. She cooked without a microwave oven for a family of five. She never could have envisioned the internet, email, or Skype. She wrote me letters by hand, licked a stamp, and sent them by snail mail. I sill have all of her letters. I think about how humans will live in the future, like Star Trek, probably traveling to other planets and taking it for granted. They will think the way I've lived is primitive. Their kids will laugh when they learn in school about fossil fueled cars, antibiotics, dental fillings, and how we couldn't control earthquakes and the economy. When I look at my grandmother's old flax spinning wheel, passed down from HER grandmother, I am glad that those days are over. Spinning looks like incredibly hard work. Life will probably be easier in the future but more complex in ways I can't even imagine. When I was Christmas shopping in Best Buy last month, I was astounded that I knew so little about state of the art electronic equipment! The technology changes so rapidly that I can't keep up with it all anymore. I feel as though I'm becoming a dinosaur. Like my high school teacher said, I've changed and my world has changed tremendously each decade. It will be exciting to see where my 60s take me, and beyond.