Some changes in one’s life can be frightening to the individuals going through them or planning to make them. But sometimes in life scary decisions have to be made for the wellbeing of the individual making them, or planning to make them, as well as to people immediately around the individual. But sometimes changes are thrust upon us by other people, and many of them are not pleasant.

There are big changes and small changes. The big changes might be someone losing their job and as a result becoming difficult to deal with on a 24-hour basis. Or it could be someone in the family becoming very ill. Other big changes might be moving to a new home or even a new country. Sometimes the latter might be by choice and sometimes it might be because of other people’s decisions that are out of our control.

But there are many people who welcome change, both large and small, and consider them not so much as problematic but as a challenge they want to try and overcome. By that I don’t mean they try to resist the change but embrace it thereby making the most of it. Hence, they fondly refer to it as ‘a challenge’.

Changes, although frightening, can prolong life and, according to a survey of 1,000 adults, can make you happier in the long run. That survey also found that small changes that you choose to make yourself could make huge differences to your outlook on life.

According to the survey, these are changes that everyone can try to make. Examples include trying out a new recipe, changing your hairstyle, eating somewhere new, finding new friends, going somewhere you’ve never been to before or doing something unplanned and at the last minute, also called being spontaneous.

However, I think spontaneity is overrated and often overstated. Who among us, who are busy working, looking after the house and home or a sick family member or struggling with their own health can be spontaneous? Who even has time to be? The very definition of spontaneous is to make a decision to do something unplanned and at the very last minute, and with very little thought process going into it. If you have a packed schedule of things that absolutely need your attention all the time, you can never be spontaneous.

You can’t very well say you have the weekend to be spontaneous, can you? I think not. Unless the idea of spontaneity in this case is to not make any particular plans for the weekend but wake up on a Saturday morning and say to yourself, or your spouse or family, that we’re doing such-and-such today. Would that work? Perhaps not because the idea may not gel with the rest of the family who might have their own plans in mind. Your spouse may be thinking of going shopping for something, for example, or he or she may have made plans for you both to do something that is not spontaneous.

But the question I have is for how long does this change making event make you happy? Change is a difference at the time it happens and for some time thereafter. But change has a time limit and pretty soon becomes routine. You move to a new house, or country, and it all may be very exciting and different for the first few months but after some time lapses it all starts to look routine and too familiar. If familiarity is your enemy then change should also be your enemy because it isn’t perpetual.

There’s a saying that says ‘all good things must come to an end’. Whilst that’s a horrible saying, in reality, change, although maybe good, but by its very nature, it must come to an end.

Bad changes may end too but they take a lot longer to get to the end than good changes do.

We’ve all gone through changes in our lives and some can be simply awful, like the loss of a loved one through illness, for example. When my father passed away around 10 years ago, it was a horrible change and life has since never been the same. But this type of change does make you think about everything that happened in the past and how things are very different now, and not for the better.

I wish life was like, ‘oh what’s something different that I could eat today…’