The other day, I was supporting some workflow changes at a clinic when someone from the HR department dropped by with a therapy dog and his trainer.

I had a plan today. I’m in Bend, Oregon for the week, and I had the day off, so I decided to go hiking near a lake south of town. I got about 10 miles down Hwy 97, and the sky started pissing rain. We make our plans, and the gods laugh.

When you start dancing tango, the only thing they really want you to do is walk. How hard could it be? To this day, it’s not unusual for me to be tango walking with my partner and feel myself on the verge of actually falling down.

In this country, we’re really attached to having lots of choices. We want to go into the grocery store and have 73 different kinds of pasta sauce on the shelves, and we’ll complain if anyone tells us we can’t.

We can have the same thoughts we put in our journal without actually writing them down. What is it about translating those thoughts into ink on paper that has such far-reaching, beneficial effects?

It’s a principle of physics that any object will tend to maintain its current speed and direction unless acted on by an outside force. That applies to more than just our physical beings. Our love of predictability and familiarity gives us a kind of behavioral inertia that acts on us just as surely as gravity or friction.

When people are first learning to paint, many start out with acrylics. They’re cheap, and easy to clean up, and they come in a huge variety of colors. Eventually, though, many artists switch over to oils. The reason, for non-painters, is counterintuitive: oils take longer to dry.

But pain always has its say. If we don't give it a voice, it speaks through our actions.

“It’s tough to make predictions--especially about the future.”

--Yogi Berra

“The Game of Life, The Game of Life, you will learn about life when you play The Game of Life.” --1960’s Milton Bradley commercial

When we feel an uncomfortable emotion, there are two ways we tend to deal with it.

Sometimes, we do our best to deny it. We shove it down the basement stairs and triple-lock the door, then try to ignore all the banging and moaning and screaming.

“What noise? I didn’t hear any noise. It must be the wind.”

That’s kind of the problem with experts—they agree. They coalesce around common wisdom, and fail to see the uncommon, unpredicted world emerging right before their eyes.

Knowing how tightly to hold onto things is useful even if you aren’t playing Smoke on the Water at 2am in your underwear (he said, purely hypothetically). Unfortunately, our instinct about how to hold things is often wrong.

Traditionally, we Chinese are big on respecting our ancestors. When my grandfather died, my grandmother set up a little shrine in their cramped Chinatown apartment, complete with burning incense and a picture of him as a young man. At Grandma’s behest, my brothers and I had to stand in front of the shrine and bow to pay our respects.

Two friends of ours recently had a surprise wedding. They were visiting family over Thanksgiving, and after dinner they told everyone to go out into the yard, then they appeared with a veil and some rings and tied the knot right then and there. And though it seemed spontaneous and a little crazy, it was anything but thoughtless. They were perfectly clear about the promise and commitment they were making to each other. It got me thinking about the promises we make in life, and the courage it takes to make them.

As two people go through life together, they can no more avoid change as a pair than they can as individuals. Every relationship has a path of its own: a beginning, a journey full of twists and turns, and eventually (at least for us mortals) an end.

When we’re annoyed or irritated at someone, we get to disown the emotion we’re feeling. It doesn’t really belong to us. It’s an unsolicited gift that some jackass left on our doorstep, so we can shake it up, open the can and spray it all over the place without taking any responsibility.

Everyone wants to know if they’re doing okay. The problem is, that’s a really hard question to answer.

“Revolution” is an interesting word. Often, it’s used to denote a sudden, profound change. But it can also mean the completion of a circle, as in: each year is a revolution of the earth around the sun. That this one word has both meanings gives us some insight into the way humans used to think about change.

When we resist change, do we fear the outcome or just having to change?