Change and Adapt

Leandro Albino de Oliveira
3 min readNov 15, 2020

Understanding the concept of change to prepare us for what follows next

Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about wanting things to go back to how it was before, or back to normal, right before COVID-19 hit us so hard. Then I start making some questions around that: What’s normal? How profound is this change or how much it will reshape our lives? Should we even expect things to be like it was before?

Everyone seems to be aware of the meaning of change. We should, right? Now we are able to see, before our very eyes, the reshaping of the world at a fast pace. Due not only Corona but also technology improvements and all the macro-trends that follows. Modifying behaviours and causing global-scale transformations. But as I was studying a millenary source of knowledge, Taoism, I got the impression that we’re missing a more profound understanding of change, even now in modern times.

Allow me to explain.

Sometimes we are led to believe that change is an external factor or our life goes through them, but our life is, by its very essence, change. We’re anything but stationary. Our very own existence is possible because of uncountables transformations that happened all across the universe. We’re are a symbiotic part of all changes that happen in our existence sphere, do we like it or not. Until we don’t really grasp and fully understand this, we won’t be in peace. We will be afraid that changes are all around us trying to affect us and reshape things that we simply don’t want to let go of.

Change

According to Taoism, the world is a continuous mutation flow from which, nothing escapes. Everything is impermanent. The only thing that won’t change is that changes are going to happen. The mutation is absolute and omnipresent. But behind the complexity of the universe, hides a simplicity. Something that rules. Preventing the universe to be just this random and chaotic course of events that would prevent anything to be formed. The simplicity consists of opposite tendencies where mutation oscillates. Active and idle, movement and inertia, ascend and decline are eternal and same paths that the unrepeatable follows. Every year, spring comes, but the flowers are different.

Adapt

Wisdom, naturally, comes from learning the cycles, mutations and phenomena, discovering the simplicity hidden behind the complex. Flowing according to the circumstances instead of denying and making a futile effort to reshape into something we want. An easy and seamless path, like the water coming down from the mountain, forever following the course. Adapting to get the most of the situation or simply to get by. What is crucial here is the understanding that one thing leads to another, it is bound to casualty, a current cycle shapes a new one from its very own material. For instance, a trend researcher looks for answers mostly on the now, the best source of information available to predict a new trend to come.

That’s precisely why a new phase is not going to look exactly like past ones as it’s being shaped by the current.

There are, of course, magnitudes of change, probably the pandemic year of 2020 is not going to change the world as much as the Black Death or the French Revolution (but then again, who knows) but I’m pretty sure is going to change something, at some level. Instead of urging for things to go back exactly to how it was before, maybe we should see this as an opportunity to pause, reflect, and reset some concepts. We need to get by and we need to learn from the current moment to be more adapted to the changes that will follow.

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Leandro Albino de Oliveira

I’m UX Designer and my goal is to use my curiosity to learn new things and my creativity to connect the informations and craft something relevant to people.