The fluidity of change

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Vegans have made one or two quite dramatic changes in their lives. For a start, they’ve replaced many of the items in their fridge. They’ve changed their lifestyle from one they’ve always known. (Now, of course, the exceptions are ‘lifers’, who’ve been vegan from birth).
Vegans may have made certain changes but there’s still a need not to be afraid of further change. Change breathes life into creative self-discovery. As vegans we need change to keep us on our toes. We have a determined, clever, vocal ‘opposition’ out there, and we need to show we’re not sitting on our laurels, complacent or afraid to change ourselves in accordance with our wish to be ‘fair’. We need to find out what the differences are between omnivore-mentality and vegan-mentality, that stands in the way of human development. Change is the key here, not always a dramatic change but a bubbling sense-of-change, which should be going on all the time, an opening up of the receptors to whatever is coming in.
Vegan animal advocates have the responsibility not only to promote plant-based products but to advocate change, if only because there’s such a deep rooted fear of it. Everything benefits from the heat of change. But it’s not an easy sell. Opinions, which have been formed and rehearsed over our lifetime, solidify and get stuck, and often it takes a dramatic illness or near death experiences to jolt us into change … and then it’s done reluctantly.
It can also take vegans a long time to realise their own need to keep moving on. We can be so focussed on food as to think there are no other dimensions to veganism … like the practice of non-violence in our general day to day behaviour. I’ve found I can be so busy putting the world to rights that I forget that I’m not separate from it just because I eat a certain type of food and have certain attitudes about animals.