Richard Hogan: We have to teach our kids to embrace change

If they manage big changes, they will feel powerful

We have to learn how to manage ourselves in relation to all this change we go through. Picture: Moya Nolan

Life is change. You are never one thing for too long. The moment you are comfortable in the sun, a leaf falls. Aging can be tricky, watching the mutated damage of time slowly creeping on your face. Waiting for the sleep mark to disappear, only to realise it’s a new line. Ah vanity! You’re a cruel mistress. Because if looks are your only value, how do you feel as you age? Nothing positive. 

So much of the marketing industry is designed around warding off the signs of aging. So much of it is attempting to sell the lie that you can stop change from occurring. But the only certainty we have is change. Our bodies change, our relationships change, even our relationship with ourselves changes. So we should be able to manage life transitions, because all we really have is change. The second law of thermodynamics states that the more we move forward the more likely it is we move towards entropy, destruction. That’s perhaps the change we fear the most. But it is ahead of us all. So, as I said, life is change. And yet, we fear it, or at the very least, we resist it more than most aspects of life.