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One of the realities of life all of us learn at some point is that you really can’t go home. Not just in the literal sense of returning to your roots, but metaphorically no one can reclaim the past. It’s common sense. Life moves on. Things change. Some of them endure while others die. But nothing stays the same. All I have to do is look in the mirror and know that. In every sense I am not the man I used to be. It’s natural law. Things change or they die. It’s called “adaptation.” What cannot adapt or refuses to adapt has already or will soon enough cease to exist. I haven’t seen any dinosaurs lately.

I’m the first to admit that accepting reality is anything but easy. I wish neighborhoods today were like the one I grew up in when I was a kid. Heck, I wish there were neighborhoods, period. But most of them are gone, and none of them is like what a neighborhood used to be, when kids could leave the house on summer mornings and not return until they were called home for supper. I wish kids could play ball together without parents being involved. I wish girls and boys still talked to each other in person instead of texting or tweeting most of the time. I could say the same thing about parents and kids. But I know yesterday is never coming back.

Neither is the sense of normal in our nation. The perpetual war on terror has changed everything and we will never go back to being a country that chose quality of life over illusions of security, that lived by the power of hope instead of living in the grips of fear, that had reason to trust political leaders would serve the common good instead of themselves and their special interests. Those days are gone. It’s called life.

I believe the “future shock” Alvin Toffler warned us about in 1970 is full blown today, that change is happening so rapidly that it is overwhelming our emotional and psychological capacity to adjust. So in our frustration we start looking for something to cling to as if we can keep it the same as it has always been, something Toffler predicted would happen. If that sounds like what tea party people are doing, it’s because they are. The phrase, “I want my country back” could not be a more telling example of what Toffler was talking about, an example of reacting to the rapid pace of change by clinging to an illusion that the past can be brought back.

But tea partiers are not alone. Churches are full of “future shockers,” people who are determined to keep things the way they’ve always been as a way of making the present the past and vice versa. The irony is that in their attempt to preserve tradition they are actually putting it in greater jeopardy. They ignore the dinosaur principle – that what does not change dies. They fail to understand that preservation and adaptation are partners, not antagonists. It is in changing that life endures. I keep reminding myself of this truth whenever I start lamenting the fact that things today are not what they used to be. They cannot be, in fact, and “be” at all.

I admit that I don’t like a lot of what I see today. I don’t like what the insatiable desire for more has done to us as a people. I don’t like the mean spirit that pervades our political discourse. I don’t like the way fear is used to undermine common sense and a sense of the common good. I wish life were smaller, simpler, less hectic, more gentle, much as I remember it when I was young. I wish people believed abundance was having enough, not having more than you need. These days I wish a lot of things, but what keeps me balanced is remembering that “wishing” and “making” are different things. The only thing I can “make” is the best of whatever situation I face, to accept the way things are and move on, be who I am, trust that coping with change is the way to preserve the best of life, for the simple reason that I can never go home again, and in fact don’t really need to.