Bound To Change

I have written here from time to time about raising our son, who was diagnosed on the Autism Spectrum when he was eight. Last year, we began working with Anat Baniel and one of her local colleagues after I interviewed Anat for Author. This was the same year we began homeschooling Sawyer, it having become unavoidably clear that the public schools could simply not accommodate his particular needs. It was a year of dramatic growth for our son. The combination of the Anat Baniel Method and the calm of homeschooling saw many old and useless habits fall away. Both the homeschooling and the Anat Baniel Method shared precisely the same goal: to free up what we had all long believed was waiting expression. So it indeed began.

Yet even as we watched this tree of a person bloom, there was the great temptation, a temptation to which we frequently yielded, to comment to one another, “Look. Look. He’s actually changing. This is not the same boy who we knew six months or a year ago.” We could hardly be blamed for this. Changes within humans usually occur steadily and minutely, like the growing of hair, and so you look up one day and need your bangs trimmed.

But I came to understand that we were never talking about Sawyer; we were always talking about ourselves. If he failed to grow, to change, to adapt, to expand, to evolve – why would this not be so for us as well? When Sawyer changed, when Sawyer dropped a habit, we were all heaving sigh of relief for collective future, for maybe we too could change what we had long felt unable to change.

Because no matter how much you love your life, you want it to change. No matter how rich you are, in love you are, slim and fit and happy you are, you still want change. You crave it and seek it even as you fear it like death itself. This is how we are literally bound to change, as a snowflake is bound within the earth for the gravity.

Write Within Yourself: An Author's Companion. "A book to keep nearby whenever your writer's spirit needs feeding." Deb Caletti.

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