Garden Spooks and Change

Although I live in Africa and it is supposed to be warm – well that is the international stereotype of ‘Africa’ in any case, I need to put frost guard on my garden every year if I want to preserve my plants for the next growing season because at night we can get some serious frost. 

And so I pull out big white sheets of frost guard and cover the areas of the garden that have plants which cannot tolerate the cold.  And every year without fail, the dog, a little black schnauzer, reacts with a ferocious irritation at the changes to his garden. 

For the first week he attacks the covers and pulls them off.  He regularly gets himself tangled in his efforts to fight the new additions to the garden because they cover areas of ground he is accustomed to patrolling and he is unwilling to change his behaviour.  And then my frost guard gets a life of its own, while he jumps and scratches at it in an effort to find his way back out.  And if it wasn’t for the 9 meters of white frost guard trailing behind this little ghost of a dog, one would almost have to look twice at this garden spook.

And every evening I am forced to go out and put the frost guard back much to my own irritation.

Thus it would seem the nature of change requires chaos. 

A change in direction requires force and energy.

A change in thinking requires a paradigm shift.

A deliberate life change requires energy and intent.

Whatever the case, from somewhere, somehow, change requires different input(s).  

Sometimes change is easier when the inputs are from external sources and change is reactionary not deliberate.  It saves ourselves from the necessity of considering options and creating a shift for which by virtue of consequence, we will be held accountable for and, by virtue of the numerous variables in life, we may get the wrong outcome and regret in hindsight - in which case one could always seek to attempt to change it again.       

But deliberate change requires choice.  It is a calculated decision to destabilise our environment and create chaos with the intention of creating new outcomes; a plan to change one’s way of thinking and make a new behaviour choice; an internal input of something new into an old situation.  

And yet the first reaction to change seems to be fear.  A worry about what is not known.  An attachment (sometimes illogical and unexplainable) to what we know even if what we know is not working well for us. 

What I don’t seem to be willing to understand is the unwillingness of humanity to honestly ask whether one is satisfied with the status quo at present?

And if the answer is ‘no’, why not change it? 

Perhaps the change you fear is little more than a garden spook.