200 CCs - March 2016

y R.L. Black
There is nothing permanent except change.
~ Heraclitus
Change is in the air. The Easter Holiday has
just passed, and in the same spirit,
what once was dead is now very much
alive. Here in the states, we’ve
weathered the winter, a kind of death,
and spring has arrived. Trees are
budding, flowers popping up out of the
cold ground, birds singing. Nature has a
story to tell us, if we listen closely
enough. It’s a story of rebirth, of
regeneration, of renewal, and the moral
of the story seems to be that life goes on
— and that change is good.
We don’t always like change. We resist.
Why? Because we’re afraid of the
unknown. We don’t know what’s
waiting for us on the other side of that
change, and it torments us. We become
like those “westerners” in Ghost Rift,
taking “torturous routes … to avoid the
Rift.” We dodge those rifts, those cracks
in the world as we know it. We are
creatures of habit, after all, and we like
our feet on solid ground. We like to know
where we stand.
In Blue Roses, the parents are so focused on
the normal, everyday world that they don’t
see the out-of-this-world sitting right in
front of them. They totally missed it. They
refuse to even acknowledge that something
has changed. The boy didn’t miss it. He saw
something he’d never seen before, and he
didn’t hesitate to explore. We’re left to
wonder if the parents had missed other
things, too. If they didn’t notice this huge
shift right in front of them, had they been
missing their son and all the tiny, daily
differences, too? Were they refusing to see?
Afraid of what those changes would mean
to their lives?
In Regrets, we see two different ways of
approaching change. The son had a “young
heart.” He saw the magic, and he gave
himself to it. The father, on the
other hand, let fear hold him back,
and in the end, he’s left with only
anguish, more haunting than any
banshee shriek. Yes, maybe the son
drowned, but wasn’t the father
drowning in sorrow and regret the
greater tragedy?
the plunge
How do you feel about change? When
those rifts come your way, how do you
react? Do you find yourself resisting?
I wonder … if we were able somehow
to let our guards down and trust a little
more, maybe we’d find something
magical ourselves? Probably not an
alien invader or a kelpie, but
something … perhaps even something
extraordinary.
The greatest change of all is faced in
Those Three Days. Death. Steve Jobs
called death “Life's change agent.”
Death is the proverbial elephant in the
room. Always hanging over our heads.
The end of our physical lives is ultimately
what we fear the most, isn’t it? Because,
like all change, we don’t know what to
expect. We don’t know how it’s gonna play
out. We can have faith and believe that
something wonderful is on the other side,
but we won’t actually know until we get
there. And that’s what makes change so
damn scary.
But if we can face those cracks that come
our way, even when we’re scared, if we can
go there bravely like Sung Li in Ghost Rift,
I think we’d find our own way through, and
who knows, we might discover on the other
side, something not so unfamiliar after all.
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