Change is Where the Magic Happens

September has always felt like the start of the new year to me and 2025 is no exception. Growing up in the US, it was the autumn when school began and here in South Africa, it is the springtime, which feels even more like a new beginning. And spring always brings welcome changes – sometimes unwelcome ones, too. The challenge lies there, for us humans, doesn’t it? Can we embrace both the shifts we yearn for and the ones which catch us by surprise?

This year in September, we lost the physical presence of Jill Stevens, founder of this magazine.  Jill’s passing makes the transition to editor of Odyssey even more poignant for me. I’d travelled to Cape Town early this month hoping to meet her in person but sadly her health was declining quickly so that wasn’t possible.  Two days after I arrived, she made the ultimate change and left this earth to go on a different sort of odyssey. Seems she passed on the baton in a very big way, to me. The timing was quite something and, while certainly her death is a great loss, she was 91 years old and had lived an extraordinary life. She was loved fully and well.  So maybe this change wasn’t a bad thing.

Maybe no change is.
I love synchronicities – and so did Jill.  Both our lives have been full of them and this transition has been no exception. Until July of this year, I was happily writing my second book, had no intention of editing a magazine and certainly not Odyssey. That wasn’t on my radar, at all. While I’d always loved the magazine and have spent my life exploring what it means to be human, even my wild imagination hadn’t conceived of this possibility. I had been in hibernation for a few years recovering from a near death experience and had just begun to think about what might be next for me.  At what most consider to be retirement age, I’d been given no choice but to begin again. The loss of my health, my marriage and my planned life had put me at a crossroads, once again. I’d sort of thought that this would be the settled, maybe even boring, stage of my life but I couldn’t have been more wrong!

I am no stranger to the concept of beginning again, trust me. My life has been a series of plot twists and pivots from the time I left home at 17, moving from New England to the American South – a real eye opener and the beginning of my lifelong dedication to civil rights. From there, I would go from studying special education to falling into an unexpected career in construction management and a premature brief marriage which involved a move from the South to Chicago. I’d stay in the Windy City for over two decades, yet everything would change in so many ways. I would fall apart completely, grow exponentially and even change my name. I mothered my child and, in time, would learn to mother myself.  Eventually, after yet another move to Washington DC and a wholly different sort of life, I would finally come home to South Africa.

That was definitely a quantum leap.  In a matter of a few months, I went from celebrating Thanksgiving in our beautifully appointed home inside the Beltway on the east coast of the United States to a very different scenario. By the first week of January, I was sleeping in a dilapidated rondavel with a large extended family of geckos and eating Rice Krispies with fellow volunteers who were mostly taking time off from university. I spent a few weeks in 40-plus degree heat in the Limpopo bush, photographing elephants and rhinos and then found my way back to KwaZulu-Natal and settled into a rental house in a small private game reserve. I acquired a Prado, having been told that four-wheel drive was non-negotiable when living in rural Zululand. The first night I drove the local dirt road through the neighbouring reserve, the moon was rising above the low Lebombo mountains and I started to weep.  The beauty of it all and the fact that I’d found my way home to the place my heart had always missed, was part of it.  And the grief, too, the realisation of all I’d left behind.  All of it hit me squarely in the chest, with an intensity that caused me to catch my breath. What had I done?  And what had I found?  Like most transformations, there was both shadow and light present in this one. By society’s values, many would say I’ve failed miserably more than once along the way but what if it has all prepared me for this new stage of my life?

And look.  It wasn’t all moonrises and baby giraffes. Making this kind of enormous shift comes with a whole lot of learning and a great deal of discomfort. I moved to KZN in the middle of a four-year drought.  Nothing in my American life had prepared me for the level of water conservation which required bathing my entire body in a 55 centimeter wide basin – and then using that water to flush toilets! It was a constant trail of challenges and beauty, intertwined with hyena calls and leopard tracks. Safety became a relative term and life had to be taken one step at a time.  I had no choice but to slow down as I had no idea what was around the corner, much like learning to drive on the steep and curvy mountain roads or figuring out how to contend with the local traffic which often consisted of a herd of buffalo or a huge bull elephant in musth.

And that’s life. We cannot know what change is coming. I have never seen the twists and turns mapped out – it’s always a surprise.  The very nature of change is to be unexpected, to arrive in its own time and way. It’s the ultimate eenie meenie miney mo game – you can make choices which lead you to one change or another but ultimately, it’s up to fate.  Just leap, with no guarantee of a safety net.

Allowing change, I’ve learned, always starts with changing your mind – or opening it, at least. My life has been an endless chain of shifts and transformations. In my younger years I fought it, wanting to fit the societal norms I’d yearned for in childhood.  The husband, the kids, the dog and the cat, the white picket fence and vacations in Florida, maybe even in the Caribbean. But change, as they say, is inevitable. What I learned, often the hard way, is that it’s best surrendered to rather than fought. It is going to happen so why not go with the flow, so to speak, rather than arrive at your next destination battered and bruised? As I write this, we are mid eclipse season.  Eclipses come twice a year, or so the astrologists tell me, and yet somehow we are still surprised by the plot twists and pivots life requires every year. It’s just part of the way the universe works, when you think about it. Often, we make it mean that something is wrong – but what if that’s not true?  What if change truly is a given and growth only happens through allowing for it? If we drop the resistance and trust that the world has many more options for happiness than we were led to believe, maybe we can even enjoy the process.

Happily, if a bit surprisingly, it seems that I am standing in one of the biggest thresholds of my life – a place where anything is possible and so much good is probable. Not just for me, but for all those that Odyssey touches. I’m not sure there’s any better feeling than to welcome change with open arms and to free fall into whatever life brings.  I’m so happy I’ve made it to this point in life, that I let change happen to me again and again, finally seeing that often life happens for rather than to us. And all of this is happening in the middle of very uncertain times in our world, when there is an underlying current of uncertainty and anxiety.  There is a lot of ‘They’ and ‘Them’ vs ‘We’ and ‘Us’ being thrown around via media. It’s hard to escape. And it’s untenable, in the long run. Human beings were not made to live in fear constantly and it’s no wonder that illnesses and dis-eases are becoming increasingly prevalent.

A lot of this fear and anxiety, through my lens, has to do with resistance to change. Whether we like it or not, change is inevitable. Suffering, however, is optional. So it all depends on how we choose to look at it, to experience it. Can we allow ourselves to let go of what we have in order to make room for what we want?

Can we open our arms and receive far more than we ever dreamed possible?