ArcaNuova · Change · Maturity
You Cannot Force Anyone to Turn Yellow
Everyone wants to change the world. Yet nobody wants to move the most comfortable chair inside their own head.
Gandhi said that we must be the change we want to see in the world. It sounds good.
In practice, however, it means dragging your inner couch potato to yoga, smiling politely at your own stupidity and ceasing to blame everything outside your own skin.
The world is only a mirror. When things out there look ugly, the fingerprints are often on our own glasses.
Wanting to improve the world without changing oneself is like dancing in the rain and complaining about getting wet. Gandhi was right, but he did not yet know social media. Otherwise he might have added:
“Clear your ego cache from time to time, or you will walk through life with outdated software.”
I understood this not by reading, but through silence.
Solitude has something brutal about it: it takes away applause, distraction and echo.
In return, it gives back an incorruptible honesty.
In that silence I learned that change does not arise through arguments, but through maturity.
Like the lemons outside my door.
The sun shines equally on all of them, yet only one seems illuminated from within.
It is a Quadrifora, bearing blossoms and fruit throughout the year, a small anarchist among trees.
It pays no attention to seasons and no attention to rules.
Then one day one of its fruits suddenly glows golden yellow while all the others are still green.
I stood there looking at it and understood:
You cannot force anyone to turn yellow.
You can talk, explain and point indignantly at the sky, but maturity comes only when its time has arrived.
The sun is the same for everyone.
But only those who let it enter them begin to glow from within.
The others remain green, debate fertilizers, compare leaf sizes and wonder why they are standing in the shade.
Change does not begin with the world.
It begins in the quiet minute when we stop wanting to be right
and begin to shine.
