I am the type of person who often looks at change as a negative thing. The thought of going to college makes me cry frequently. Recently it seems like everything around me has been changing. As a person who is not the best at accepting change, I take a long time to adjust to it.

My aunt who has always lived about five minutes away from me is moving 20 minutes away. She is no longer a walk away. I have to accept that moving is the best decision and her new place makes her happy. All I really want is for her to be happy so if moving makes her happy, I should be overjoyed that she is making a new home. 

Recently at the nursing home I volunteer at, the people I volunteer with have become unable to play card games. I tried to play Uno, a game we played a few weeks earlier and was shocked and saddened to find the game was not understood anymore. At first I thought maybe I was complicating the game, but then I realized that the fault was not in me nor them. Simply the aging had caught up to my friends. 

This scared me at first. Not that I am a stranger to watching people age. I have done it for some time, but it just reminded me how fast a drastic change can occur. It got me thinking about how one day everything can seem normal and the next everything changes.

Change is often looked at in a scary way but the thing is these experiences allowed me to think about all the changes I have gone through in my life good and bad. A good change was when my little brother was born. I was scared and excited and that was one of the best things to ever happen to me. When I moved schools in seventh grade my life changed and for awhile it wasn’t for the better, but now I think back and am grateful to no longer be in the mindset I was in then.

I spent the night thinking and brainstorming new simpler games we can play at the nursing home. The nursing home reminded me that life changes and you have to move forward. Life becomes a lot more enjoyable when you focus on yourself in the moment. I’m trying to understand this lesson every time I have to re learn it again.