During a long drive about two weeks ago, the song Changes, by David Bowie, came on the radio. Bowie and his music have been on my mind ever-since. It’s kind of odd, I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a fan. Released in 1972, neither the song nor Bowie were a household music staple in my youth. His 1983 album, Let’s Dance burst into my musical world through his iconic MTV debut video for the title track, which went to number one on the charts. But it was his 15th studio album and the only one of his 26 that I purchased.

But Changes appeared like an old friend as the following lyric jumped-out to me:

And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They’re quite aware of what they’re going through

This lyric is quoted in the opening title screen of 1985’s The Breakfast Club, a classic John Hughes coming-of-age movie, set in a Saturday detention session at a Chicago high school. It beautifully captures the spirit of that movie, setting up the tension between a group of teens moving through their growing pains and the authoritarian Vice Principal who assigns them an essay with the prompt: “Describe to me who you think you are.”

Who do you think you are? The classic challenge to the youth who has overstepped, defied, or challenged authority. It drips with the high-handed voice of experience that has forgotten its own journey of defiance and error, as it intones: how dare you. How dare you challenge me. How dare you pursue your selfish aims. How dare you screw up. Looking back on my 34 years as a father, I’m sure I’ve used it a few times.

Perhaps my sense of these changes was made more acute this week as traded-in our Yukon XL. The family truckster that has been a staple of our family life over the last ten years, overseeing our final transition from kids at home to empty-nesters, to grandparents, to that stage of life in which one moves from the blur of child-rearing to, hopefully, a deeper, more reflective, and perhaps more intentional engagement with a world that looks unlike anything one could have imagined.

Still don’t know what I was waiting for
And my time was running wild, a million dead-end streets
And every time I thought I’d got it made
It seemed the taste was not so sweet

Bowie evokes his own sense of rebellion while recognizing that many of those things we chase, young or old, are ultimately unsatisfying. Walking through changes, we begin to see some of our own dead-ends and the hard lessons learned. And then, re-learned. Do we ever learn? Parenthood pushes and pulls us through the many places where our becoming moves from labor pains to growing pains to the acute pruning of the many accretions we gathered along the way. We experience it on the front line of a life that is often changing wildly while wildly changing us.

Reading a recent LinkedIn post entitled The Visible Signs of Our Lives, from my friend, Anthony Manno, the pressing sense of change hit me in a different way. In his post, Manno, the third generation owner of a clothing and tailoring business, shares a beautiful reflection on his business, his catholicism, and expressing belief in a visible manifestation of things that necessarily remain invisible. He connects the threads wonderfully but my reflections sit up one layer. I’ve watched this young man move from college student athlete to husband, to father, to business owner, and now to someone with profound insights on life, purpose, and his place in it.

Like my own children, this young man is suddenly “grown up.” But of course, none of it is suddenly. These are all long, difficult becomings.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, turn and face the strange
Ch-ch-changes, don’t want to be a richer man
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, turn and face the strange
Ch-ch-changes, just gonna have to be a different man
Time may change me, but I can’t trace time

And beautiful ones. I reflect today as these changes continue. Occasionally, we can tune-in to the tectonic shifts in our lives, and see them with new eyes. See them in the context of the great sweep of existence that gives them an epic, epochal, flavor. Our small place in some great and grand story.

Today, I celebrate my 34th year of fatherhood and my 9th year of grandfatherhood, with almost all of my children, all of my grandchildren, and my own father, who ironically was born in the same year as David Bowie and shares a love of the album Let’s Dance, and particularly the song, China Girl, with me. I get to look upon these visible signs of my life, which reveal all that is most important to me while reflecting those invisible things that give it all meaning…the hidden that makes it all transcendent.

Change is truly a beautiful, magical, challenging, and strange thing. I’m still trying to figure out how best to turn and face it but I suppose that too is part of its compelling power. The deep wrestling that demands something from us, costs us, and ultimately moves us to the next version of ourselves, is its own necessity. We may try to run from it, but it finds us nonetheless. That’s ok. We’re quite aware of what we’re going through.