"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance."

—Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

Change tends to activate self-will. When things shift—relationships, circumstances, the ground we thought was stable—the impulse is often to resist, to slow it down, to find some way to re-establish what was there before. Even when the change is welcome, something in us can brace. The familiar, however uncomfortable, at least has the virtue of being known.

The dance Watts describes may not be graceful by necessity. It might be awkward, uncertain, nothing like what we planned. But there may be something in the moving itself—in the willingness to let what is shifting actually shift—that the bracing against it never offers. A sense, however briefly, of being carried rather than stranded.