Last week (before the storms hit) we went for a walk up the cliff tops by the sea at West Bay. It was one of those cold crisp winter days with beautiful periods of sunshine interrupted only by occasional white clouds. We let Rosy off the lead and having walked a while we stopped to sit and drink in the view and sunshine.

Taking a moment to reflect on the previous week which had been pretty busy. I had been up to London and Birmingham to deliver workshops for a large corporate going through significant change. I was there (on behalf of Zenith Leadership) to support them with their inner game – how to meet the changes that were happening with as much awareness and understanding of themselves as they could. It was very clear as we talked about the impact of change, the stresses and strains that it can bring, and the ways that we can help ourselves to navigate it, that change wasn’t going to stop.

In fact, if anything, change is coming faster and more globally than it has done for a long, long time. It is almost as if the world itself is speeding up.

It can be tempting, and very human, to move into denial when we see change that we don’t like. Denial isn’t about pretending change isn’t happening, denial is about pretending that it won’t, or doesn’t need to, affect me. It’s happening out there and I’m not going to let it in, or let it change my life, or my world.

Inevitably it will and it does, because we are not islands, we are connected and interconnected in so many ways.

This thought brought me back to the bench I was sitting on. Like many benches with a good view, it was also a memorial to a loved one, missed by those left behind. My thoughts turned to one that I miss, my son, who died suddenly at the age of 19, just 4 and half years ago. An undeniable, and heart wrenching change that threw our lives up in the air, and challenged us to look, think and feel beyond our ordinary way of being. One of the things I learnt in my grief was that we cannot control life, we cannot know what change is coming or what is ‘round the next corner’. All we can do is meet that change as best we can in every moment.

Change is natural. Imbalance and big shifts are natural. What is less natural is our expectation that things should stay the same. Why do we do this?

Maybe we mistakenly expect the world to be unchanging when that which is unchanging is actually within us or as T.S.Eliot puts it….

“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.”

In essence we look to the changing world for a sense of stillness, and stability when in reality that is only accessible within as Eckhart Tolle also says:

 “You are never more essentially, more deeply, yourself than when you are still.”

So, the path to thriving in an ever-changing and uncertain world is to reconnect with that which is unchanging, our centre, our still point in the dance of life.

I sat on that bench for a while longer, meditating with the sun on my face, feeling deeply into the unchanging core of self . The witness. The still, interconnected source within whilst the dance of life played on.