The Deep Wish – “Don’t Change Me”

The right to change is personal. Only personal change sticks. Only when we want to change, a habit, or to reinvent ourselves, will we actually change. Yet, we exist in a world that insists on changing people. From our processes of education, business, marketing, technology, family, and social sciences; all of these exist to change people.

But, we must be the ones who decide.

We must be the ones that own the idea of change and the processes toward it.

And we just do not want people to come to us and insist we change; we want to be influenced more softly than that.

Changing Others

We ordinarily agree with the idea that we cannot change people, until, that is, we come face-to-face with our clandestine strategies of changing the ones deeply in our midst.

The family members, friends, co-workers, church attendees, and those in our communities, are all within reach of our desire to change them. Some of us are more controlling than others, just as we are more or less overt or covert in our strategies.

The wish to change others is about converting them to the truth as we see it.

Any time we seek to convince someone as to our opinion we are, even to a very minor extent, trying to influence them; to change them in some small way. Opinion proffering is never really a good idea in the realm of social freedom. Our opinions are good to be expressed only as our own.

Our challenge is to identify situations where we wish to transfer our opinions onto others, especially through the use of influence. Like, whose benefit is this for? We may be deluding ourselves to think that venturing our opinion to influence them will actually help. Who is it really helping?

In Social Situations – “Don’t Change Me”

Social situations are best constructed in friendly, cohesive ways, where we can be ourselves and not be judged and not have others’ opinions foisted upon us.

The highly opinionated soon find themselves friendless. That is one type of social justice in action. People knowingly and unknowingly respond to the inner desire—the deep wish—that says, “Don’t change me! Like, don’t even think about it!”

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One of the greatest ideas of life is to cohabit peacefully, without pressure to change. People change of their own volition, not because somebody talks them into it. The friends we love the most are those who enjoy us for just who we are.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.