Change comes slowly

I was the eager beaver at the beginning of January, ready to stick to my resolutions and make big changes this year.

Beryl Markham, in her book West with the Night, reminds me that change comes slowly.

“A word grows to a thought—a thought to an idea—and idea to an act,” Markham writes. “The change is slow, and the present is a sluggish traveler, loafing in the path tomorrow wants to take.”

Suddenly, sometimes, we notice that something has changed. “Life had a different shape; it had new branches and some of the old branches were dead,” she writes. “It had followed the constant pattern of discard and growth that all lives follow. Things had passed, new things had come.”
–Joy