Change or transformation?

The difference between ‘change’ and ‘transformation’ is simple and profound.

Lynne Twist, a global activist and award-winning author of The Soul of Money, articulated it well during the graduation speech she gave at Bainbridge Graduate Institute in June 2012 (the emphasis is mine).

“Change can change back. (We can go from conservative to liberal, from disciplined to undisciplined…) Change is volatile. Transformation is completely different – though sometimes it is called change. 

Transformation never makes the past wrong. It transforms it. It doesn’t deny it. It honours it in a way that you can move forward without making anything wrong, and having the past somehow now become complete, rather than wrong. Transformation has a permanence to it – where once you transform, once you awaken, once you see the stations you didn’t see before, you can’t go back. 

Transformation has the ultimate power of time, and what the world is crying for now is transformation, not necessarily more change, though some change may be a part of it – the route to transformation. 

Transformation suddenly makes the past make sense, and new futures open up.”