Agile

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“If nothing ever changed, there would be no such things as butterflies.”

-Wendy Mass

Things are going to change.  Jobs will be gained and lost.  Loves will be embraced and released.  Businesses will thrive and dissolve.  Residences will be moved into and out of.  Health, finances, plans, will go this way and then that.

Change is the thing we aren’t naturally programmed for because the internal, stay-safe, survival mechanisms are geared to kick in when “different” shows up.

Let’s say you usually spend all day in an office.  Boom!  Layoff, and you’re now home.  Or you’ve been in a relationship for years.  Boom!  It breaks up.  Or, yes, even those who haven’t been in a relationship for years…Boom!  You’re in one!

We can go through the above scenarios for any aspect of life.  The question is: how to adapt most effectively.

The first hurdle is the commitment to actually adapt.  Many hold onto the old system, pattern, situation like a child attached at the hip to a parent on the first day of kindergarten.  We’ve probably all read “Who Moved My Cheese?” and yet a commitment to embrace and adapt to change isn’t always our first reaction.

The second element is to understand and embrace agile.  Agile is not only a descriptive of someone nimble and quick, but a term used in the world of software development where the focus is on quick adaptation based on short and regular reassessments of the situation and what is wanted and needed. But they get the product out NOW…not when it’s perfected.

There’s a lot of relevance to this concept for our own lives in The Back Forty.  Guess what?  Shift happens!  And it tends to take on greater seeming impact and significance as we move into the second half of life.

Taking on the agile way in which those in the first half – the 18, 20, 25yr olds – simply play and learn and play and learn some more can support us who have “been around the block a few times” loosen up, commit to adapt, and by God even start to have fun with it!

Giving up the expectation that anyone or anything will stay the same or that, in adapting, we’ll “get it right the first time” allows us the patience to stay on the playing field…with an emphasis on “play“.

Try a new approach? Conduct an experiment? Design a new context within which to hold it all?  Any of these can be forward-falling directions to take so as to flow with the shifting winds of life.  And falling forward fast is what will get us doing what we came here to do…not waiting until everything is stable.

Where can you bring playful and agile adaptation to changing plans, people and places in your Back Forty world today?

“Success today requires the agility and drive to constantly rethink, reinvigorate, react and reinvent.”

-Bill Gates

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Darrell Gurney
 

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