Adaptability

Oops. It's been over a month since my last post! I can legitimately blame it on being busy (excuses, excuses).

For those of you who don't know, I've started school (again). I'm working on an Associates in Accounting so that I can take advanced courses in the future and possibly become an enrolled agent or take the CPA (possibly). I am also taking these classes with the thought of starting my own business (likely animal or publishing-related) one day.

So now I am working full-time, going to school full-time, keeping up with my half-marathon training, conditioning Toby, writing, taking care of my pups, and attempting to be social now and then. So if I don't respond to contacts right away, gently remind me again that you're still around.

And on to the topic at hand...

It amazes me how adaptable we are. Our bodies are constantly adapting to accommodate environmental, physical, and mental changes occurring every day. We adapt without meaning to, often without wanting to. Why are so many of us resistant to change when change is an ongoing process that is inescapable? Perhaps it's the predictability we want to avoid...at least the predictability of change, like knowing you have to go grocery shopping but wanting to avoid it. Of course, then you go hungry.

What do we do when we don't/can't adapt? What does this do to our creativity? Do we have to adapt to everything? Doesn't something constant define us more than something changeable? I'm honestly not sure. I want need must but can't adapt to contentedness in the moment. Not to say I'm never happy, but I get restless in my perpetual state of now.

It's odd when you dread something, only to realize you're used to it, and you wonder when that adaptation occurred. Yes, it was surely a gradual process, but when was that moment when your body and mind unified in thought and breathed out an agreement of change. The body/mind adapt and then make this change (which, at this point, is not longer a change but is now a constant) normal.

I will say that adaptation is the process of making the irregular, regular; turning a change into a constant. Adaptation is a cater-cousin defamiliarization. Though defamiliarization makes the normal appear strange, adaptation finds the strange and studies it to make it ordinary. I don't believe the two to be opposites, though they may seem that way. Both observe oddity to better understand its source.



image courtesy of Flickr and Mr. Cousins