Who benefits when we believe consistency is a virtue?

We’re taught that changing our minds is weakness.

Changing careers is failure.

Changing politics is betrayal.

Changing lovers is instability.

Changing beliefs is hypocrisy.

Maybe.

Or maybe the opposite is true.

Maybe refusing to change is the greater lie.

The oak tree doesn’t become a prairie because someone tells it to. But neither does it keep producing acorns after lightning hollows out its trunk. Life adapts or it dies.

People are the only creatures expected to become monuments to their younger selves.

That strikes me as bizarre.

The twenty-five-year-old who chose medicine didn’t know what the sixty-five-year-old would know.

The woman who married at twenty-two couldn’t possibly promise what the woman at fifty would want.

The activist.

The executive.

The mother.

The monk.

Each of them was real.

None of them was permanent.

I don’t admire people who never change.

I admire people who notice they’ve changed and have the courage to rearrange their lives accordingly.

Starting over isn’t courage because it’s adventurous.

It’s courage because it requires disappointing everyone who preferred the previous version of you.

That’s the real cost.

Not uncertainty.

Disappointing the audience.

Perhaps that’s why beginning again feels so liberating.

You’re no longer trying to keep a promise your younger self made to strangers.

You’re simply trying to tell the truth about who is standing here now.