Women have one advantage over men. Throughout history they have been forced to make adjustment. They have adapted their own personal wishes and ambitions and hopes to those of their husbands, their children and the requirements of their homes.

In the great majority, they have arranged to fit their own interest into a pattern primarily concerned with the interest of others.
This has not always been an easy process but the result is that in most cases, it is less difficult for a woman to adjust to new situations than it is for a man.

From the time they are little girls, women are expected to adapt themselves. They do this first in learning how to manage their father, and then it is only a step to knowing how to manage their young men and finally their husbands.

But it is always the woman who is making the chief adjustment; finding how to behave in order to get what she wants and also to give what she has to give.

There are few cases in which women do not accept the fact that their homes must run to suit their husband’s needs and wishes; in which they do not adjust to the way of life of the man with whom she now has life’s closest relationships. The man on the other hand, often grows up with the idea that he should be able to dominate the forces of nature; the forces of his material world.

He seeks to make them adjust to him. It is one reason why men tend to be more conservative than women. In business, they are apt to fight against new things, unless they have initiated them. They do not want to make this adjustment. The result of these two conflicting types of training is that women today appear to be able to adjust themselves to the conditions and the concepts of a changing world more easily than men.

Readjustment is a kind of private revolution.

Each time you learn something new, you must readjust the whole framework for your knowledge. It seems to me that one is forced to make inner and outer readjustments in one’s life. The process never ends.

And yet, for a great many people, this is a continuing problem because they appear to have an innate fear of change, no matter what form it takes – changed personal relationships, changed social or financial conditions.

The new or the unknown becomes in their minds something hostile, almost malignant. It is not only in times of great world changes like the present that readjustment is necessary, though it is certainly more vital now. No matter how outwardly tranquil or unchanging one’s situation may appear to be, it requires constant readjustment.

Let’s start with the most obvious and inescapable part of adjustment – the change – physical and emotional, that are an inherent part of every stage of growth and ageing. Almost everyone recognises this necessity for readjustment during the period of adolescence; but do we not seem to be equally aware of it in terms of middle age, of the elderly, of the old?

Every age, someone has said, is an undiscovered country. We are constantly advancing, like explorers into the unknown, who make life an adventure all the way. How interminable and dull that journey would be if it were on a straight road over a flat plain, if we could see ahead the whole distance, without surprises, without the salt of the unexpected, without challenge?

I wish with all of my heart that every child could be so imbued with that sense of adventure of life that each change, each adjustment, each surprise – good or bad – that comes along would be welcomed as part of the whole enthralling experience.

Surprise Elvin Basson
Weenen