Change

I remember being ten years old and seeing basketball as the greatest thing in the world. I loved playing it, I love talking about it, I loved thinking about it. I collected cards and would stare at them for minutes at a time. Flicking through the pages of my folders and marveling at the superhuman shots that were captured just for me. Space Jam came out that year, and it's amazing how much I remember of that movie. It feels like almost every scene was etched into my brain the moment it came onto the screen in front of me. That movie, along with Tim Burton's Batman, is the movie of my childhood. But Batman came before, and in a sense I had actually grown out of Batman by the time I was ten. Well, at least out of seeing it as the big kahuna. You see, I remember being seven years old and seeing Batman as the greatest thing in the world. I loved playing it, I love talking about it, I loved thinking about it. But I guess I changed, without much fanfare, to being a basketball fanatic. But there was a moment, during my love of basketball, when I was standing in my room staring at my basketball posters and a thought came into my head. What if one day I stopped loving basketball and moved onto something else. I became scared, because if I started to fall in love with something else, then I wouldn't love basketball anymore.

But I love basketball!

I don't want to lose it!

And just then, as my feeble child brain was worrying about losing the thing that I loved, I realized something: If there comes a moment where my love for basketball ever dies, I won't be sad at that moment, because I won't love it anymore. So I must love until I don't love anymore. And I can't control how long that is.

A few months had passed and I'm sitting on my couch watching wrestling, marveling at the superhuman moves that were captured just for me. I hadn't thought about basketball in months. I didn't miss it. I had changed and I couldn't deny it. Most of all, I didn't want to deny it, because my new love was so much fun.

The lesson I learned was that if we force or deny change, it will hurt us both short term and long term. And when we feel ourselves changing, it will only be natural.

- Lee