To suggest that the death of a loved one and change have anything in common seems surprising, and perhaps even outrageous. We dread the one, and at least sometimes want the other; so they must be opposite. And yet they are one-and-the-same thing, part and parcel as all emotional opposites are such as love and hate.

Yet to avoid our fear of it, we've always tried to do change in one grand step, so we can avoid the sometimes-terrible growing pains of it actually knowingly happen. Like the American Revolution and the Constitution that eventually evolved out of it. That was a great changing. But what have we done with it? We insist those long-ago events, and the documents that asserted their achievements, permanently established a perfect democracy for all time. To achieve that extreme end we have elevated those origins to the status of a holy event, and insist thereafter that, no matter how long ago they happened, we must conform to every detail of their original structures.

Thomas Jefferson predicted that the Constitution would eventually produce an oligarchy-which has come to pass. We are now ruled by the rich and famous, which includes the politicians and actors they imitate. Stands to reason. Any unchanging public institution creates a dictatorship of habit-what worked yesterday must also work for tomorrow. So Jefferson wrote and sponsored the passage of the Bill of Rights to try and head off as much damage as possible. Though history classes seldom if ever discuss this fascinating piece of the past. Jefferson had originally tried to write into the Constitution an automatic convention every 25 years-every generation-to give it opportunity to grow over time; but the measure failed to pass. That's when the Bill of Rights became essential.

Change involves giving up part of the past-thus its likeness to the death of a loved one. Change means to replace something depended upon, revered, cherished and honored, probably for a very long time, with something new, untested, probably wrong, our fear tells us-with something awkward and as yet still largely unformed, that needs time and opportunity to demonstrate what it will really produce. Ideally these two processes are going on simultaneously-a perpetuation of the past, and the advent of the new.

Yet this sane and gradual evolution from one thing to another can happen only if we can tolerate and manage the confusion, ambiguity, consternation and frustration of being in the midst of an uncertain process that can take a very long time.

The truth is we are ill equipped for any of that. We've never challenged ourselves in this way, to this extent. We keep trying to make what seems true now, true forever, instead of accepting nature's most likely purpose for creating a creature like us-to be the change-masters, the learning experts. For learning is indeed both our greatest talent, and also our destiny. Meaning what nature must have had-in-mind in creating such a perfidious, cantankerous, fearful, flighty, willful, self-centered-yet so utterly charming, gregarious, occasionally loving, imaginative and creative animal like the human species.

Though as profoundly clever as we are at making electronic and mechanical marvels, we are equally naïve and under-developed in managing emotional/spiritual transformations-what change really does to each and every one of us when it happens. That is, if it's really change, and not just another new version of the same-old that claims to be a changing, when it's just the pretense of one.

Most of us still leave the interpretation of emotional experience to family, and the meaning of spiritual experience to God-which means we believe we can't handle either for ourselves. There are some of us who try, and many more of us who experiment in this most unexplored realm of who and what we are, i.e. the emotive, spiritual realm of human nature. But the vast majority of humans want no part of taking their spiritual life in hand. We all pretend we do. But if we did, we would personally change so much that our families, and our spouses, in very powerful ways, wouldn't know us anymore, and might not even like the new us ... an us who challenges and changes what they believe in. That kind of deep structural change happens rarely. And when it does it's generally considered an act of God.

This is why we have so much trouble getting along with each other, because, for the most part, we have such a shallow, uninformed, guilty shameful relationship with ourselves. Having recently become so very much more aware of our many mistakes, it's popular now to regard humanity as a blight on the planet. When what we need is a chance to make better use of this new wisdom.

But if we are to do better, we must start looking at things we don't like to see very much-such as ourselves. We are part-and-parcel of whatever we look at. And yet we pay almost no attention to the me-aspect of the object we're viewing. We think it can be seen "as itself", what objectivity is all about. When for a hundred years we've known rationalism is partially a fraud. Pure objectivity can't be done. We like to pretend it can because of all the wonderful technologies it produces. But objectivity sure as hell can't deal with being emotional and spiritual, probably our most powerful talent, if we ever get our act together to make maximum use of it.

When it comes to spiritual matters-what learning new things is all about-we're like bulls in a china closet. We step over or trample most of what there is to see. That doesn't mean we're bad or lazy creatures. It just that we've never copped to these limitations so we could begin learning to remedy the situation. Truth is, we're not too far out of the jungle, as our continuing penchant for violence attests.

Our first step will be to accept loss as a normal part of life. Being alive is about more than sexual intercourse, showing off, pampering buying sprees, and vacations. It's about reaching for the stars in a spiritual/emotional way. We all crave an assignment of that kind to give our life purpose, but at the same time despair at finding such opportunity anywhere. When it's right there every day of our life waiting to be addressed, inside of each one of us.