We All Change, Every Moment Of Every Day
Everyone changes, no matter what you might want to think. As is the way of life.
You go through your life; you grow up with siblings and cousins and classmates that get to know you. Some of these people are close enough to you that they know your habits and your way of thinking. But they only know those things about you for the time that they are with you.
As you grow, you part with these people more and more, and you all go your own way and do your own thing. As you go your way, you learn different things and you meet different people; you gain a different perspective on the world and everything around you. You change along the way, throughout your journey.
You see that with a lot of people, especially those closest to you when young, assume that everyone is the same as how they remember them. They assume that they know their ins and outs, and their every quirk and habit. But they don’t; they can’t. They never really did, even though they had their assumptions. The main problem is, those assumptions remain.
We change, constantly; it’s the way life is. The more you learn and the more you live, the more you change. Just as much as our looks change as we age, so do our habits and our beliefs.
You’re always learning about someone even if you’ve known them for your entire lifetime. Just because you grew up with someone does not automatically mean you know everything about them. That, and people do change their thoughts and opinions quite often. You should continually get to know those that you already know; otherwise, you keep an image of them which may not be the person you are speaking with. We grow, we learn, we change, and we cannot keep an image of someone and expect that image to never change. We need to keep taking multiple images over time, just like taking photographs of someone who you can see age through time. We age, and we change throughout.
The YOU that is your core self will always be you, but you grow and learn and build layers on top of that YOU that changes you throughout your entire lifetime. So, although you are still YOU, your outlook on things changes and it shapes the YOU that you present to others.
You don’t know a thing about someone just because you once knew a piece of them. That piece may still be there, but there are many more pieces now, many more layers that weren’t there before. Many of those layers you don’t see because you didn’t bother to look at them. Instead you insist on only seeing what was there when you thought you knew that someone before.
If you want to know someone, really know them, you have to take the time to continually get to know them. Even if you think you know them well, you must take the time to get to know them even more or else you don’t really know them at all; nor do you care to know them.
Life changing experiences (such as near death, or a serious accident) happen to people all the time. These are drastic changes because of an event in their lives that changes how they look at things and how they experience life. They will never be that same person you thought you knew once upon a time. For some reason, this kind of change is acceptable. So then, why are slower, not so noticeable changes not so acceptable?
Slow changes happen over long periods of time. We don’t see the changes all at once. And when you don’t see the changes all at once, or know why (or care to know why) someone has changed, then you tend to disregard those changes because they’re not directly in your face. That’s why it tends not to be acceptable.
Every time you talk to someone on the phone or meet up with them in person, even if it was the week before, or even a day before, they are not the same person as when you saw or spoke to them last. That is fact. Things happen in the time you are apart, sometimes major, sometimes minor. Those things affect a person and change them either rapidly or slowly.
You are not the same YOU that you were 10 years ago. We all change. It’s time to start acknowledging this and accepting it. If you can’t, then you never will know anyone because you don’t care to take the time, every time, to know them.