The Change You Can’t See: What a Coffee Morning Taught Me About Judging People and Change

Jade Canavan  ·  Inner Lifetime, Lincoln  ·  www.innerlifetime.com

A note before we begin: this piece touches on the loss of a child. Names and details have been changed, and I have deliberately kept them vague. Please read gently, and step away if you need to. 🤍

I spent a whole year quietly holding an opinion about a woman I’d met once.

It took a single sentence, said casually from the driver’s seat of a car, to take that opinion apart completely — and to leave me sitting with something I still haven’t fully put down.

I want to tell you about it, because it changed the way I look at people - while i always consciously try to bring awarness to my thoughts, opinions and judgments, the reality is that our conditioning runs deep and sometimes we just trust what we hear from those close to us. And because it’s the clearest example I’ve ever had of a truth I now believe absolutely: change is happening constantly, in all of us, and most of it is invisible.

Setting the scene (I’m a yogi — of course I’m setting the scene)

I have a friend who lives overseas. I’ll call her Sarah.

We met through a previous relationship of mine — one I’ve written about before, and one that took a great deal from me. But I’ve made a decision about that chapter, and I’ll share it with you here in case it’s useful: I’ve chosen to focus on what that relationship gave me rather than what it robbed me of. And near the top of that list is Sarah.

But we didn’t simply carry on when that relationship ended. We stopped talking.

Because he made those weeks count. He used the separation to build a story with Sarah — a version of events, a version of me — and I had no idea any of it was happening. I didn’t contact her. I was way too busy dealng with the chaos and trying to keep my head above water (many of you were here for it). Why would I? As far as I was concerned, that friendship had left with him and i needed to focus on me.

Six weeks later, she reached out to me.

Not because anybody told her to. Because something didn’t sit right. She had been handed a story, and some part of her simply wouldn’t take it. So she came and checked for herself.

That one decision is the reason I have her in my life at all.

And I want you to notice what happened there, because it is exactly the same thing that happens later in this blog, only pointed the other way. Sarah was given a version of a person, and she went and looked for herself. I was given a version of a person, and I believed it for twelve months.

Never ignore your gut. And when your gut speaks up about somebody — go and find out.

So we got closer, not further apart. We’d both been shown a version of someone that turned out not to be real, and there’s a particular kind of bond that forms between two people who have been fooled by the same mask. We understood each other without needing to explain.

Sarah’s husband’s work means they relocate often, so I visit her wherever she happens to be, usually with my daughter. She’s soul-sister territory. We both had turbulent childhoods and learned a lot of things the hard way, without much guidance — and I think that’s why it works. There’s no performance between us. We pick up exactly where we left off, every single time, and every time I leave I feel like my soul has been fed.

So that’s the backdrop. Now the story.

The evening I made up my mind about someone

On one of my visits last year, Sarah told me about a situation that had been bothering her locally.

A family in the area had been let down badly over a rental property. The owner had been asked to make changes to the house before the family moved in — real changes, expensive ones — and had gone ahead and done them in good faith. Then, at the last minute, the family pulled out. The owner was left out of pocket and out of patience.

Sarah found it disrespectful. It sat wrong with her, and honestly, it sat wrong with me too but of course i wasn't close enough to the stuation for it to really impact me. Later that week we went to a friend’s house for the evening, and the woman in question was there. I’ll call her Nina.

They introduced themselves. The house came up. Nina acknowledged, quite openly, that they’d changed their minds late on about a property, because they’d wanted somewhere more practical for the children. Sarah didn’t confront her outright — but she made a few pointed comments about how much work had been done and how it looked from the outside.

It got a little awkward.

I sipped my drink and said nothing.

And in that silence, I made up my mind about Nina. Mother of a big family. A bit entitled. Didn’t seem to show much accountability, didn’t seem particularly bothered about the inconvenience she’d caused. I was on Team Sarah, and so I judged her. I'll own it.

Then the evening moved on, they left, and nothing more was said. I finished my holiday, flew home, and didn’t think about Nina again.

One year later

I go back this year. There’s a coffee morning — one of those lovely gatherings where newcomers meet people and get their bearings.

As we walk in, Sarah waves warmly at someone across the room. Clearly close. Clearly familiar. She introduces us.

I do my usual — oh hi, lovely to meet you — and the woman smiles and says, “We’ve actually met. Last year. I’m Nina.”

Oh.

Well. This relationship has changed, I thought. Intrigue piqued.

And Nina was lovely. Chatty, engaged, laughing with everyone. She and Sarah were obviously close now — the easy, unforced kind of close. I sat and listened, made small talk with a couple of newcomers who’d had the misfortune of being seated next to a Brit who’d be gone in three days, and I noticed nothing. Nothing at all.

It was a good hour. Warm, funny, ordinary.

The sentence in the car

We’re driving home afterwards and I say something like: well, you and Nina have come a long way since all that business with the house.

And Sarah says, almost in passing:

“Oh no — that was a misunderstanding. That wasn’t even her.”

It wasn’t even her.

The thing I’d built an entire opinion on. The thing I’d carried around in the back of my mind for twelve months. It never happened. Not by her. The property Nina was talking about was something totally different and even while Sarah was discussing this last year, nobody even knew they were talking about different things. A misunderstanding. They happen.

And then Sarah says: “But I told you about what happened over the winter (this is in between my visits), didn’t I?”

I said no. I didn’t think so.

Her son had died.

What I couldn’t see

He’d become unwell. Nothing anyone was alarmed by at first — the kind of thing you put down to a bug and expect to pass. A bit off. Headaches. Then being sick.

He even went out with the family at one point, before his mum came and collected him so he could go home to bed.

That’s the detail that undoes me, if I’m honest. How ordinary it all looked. How much it looked like nothing at all.

But it didn’t pass. It got worse over a matter of days, until she made the call to get him to hospital.

By the time they arrived it was already far more serious than anyone had understood — much further along than anyone could have known. He was taken straight in to surgery. There was no time to sit with it, no time to prepare, no time for a mother to even begin catching up with the size of what was happening to her child.

While the family waited, the women in that community started arriving at the hospital to sit with them. Nobody asked them to. They just came. That’s one of the few parts of this I can think about without breaking. Community, the power of it, the shared love (I am teary writing this now).

And then, while they were all sitting there together, an emergency call went out over the tannoy. Staff running.

It was him.

His heart had stopped. They were able to bring him back — but only briefly. Only long enough for his family to say goodbye. Sarah and her husband were asked to go and collect the rest of the children and bring them to the hospital to do exactly this. It all happened so fast.

They were partway through that drive when the message came through to Sarah’s phone.

So she knew - he had gone for good this time. With all those children in the back of the car — laughing, messing about, thinking they were on their way to see their brother — she knew that they weren’t. She knew exactly what they were about to walk into. And she had to keep driving.

I cried when she told me. I’m not ashamed to say I’ve cried about it since.

The change nobody prepared them for

I keep coming back to those children in the back of that car.

Because when we talk about coping with change, we’re usually talking about adults — people with a whole toolkit behind them. We’ve been through breakups and bereavements and redundancies and house moves. We have decades of evidence that we have survived hard things before. Even when something is unbearable, some part of us recognises the shape of it. We know, somewhere underneath the panic, that we have been knocked down and got up again.

Those children have almost none of that.

They don’t have the years, the perspective or the reference points. They haven’t yet built the quiet inner voice that says this is the worst thing that has ever happened to me, and I will still be here next year. They got into a car as one kind of family about to become an entirely different one and not one second of it had been explained to them.

And they will still have to adjust. That’s the part that sits heavy with me. Not being ready doesn’t get you out of it. Not having the language, the maturity, the experience or the support doesn’t pause anything. Change doesn’t check whether you’re qualified to handle it. It doesn’t wait until you’re older, or stronger, or until things have calmed down a bit.

It arrives. And then you have to live afterwards.

And that’s life. It isn’t fair, it isn’t gentle, and it doesn’t ask permission.

But here’s what I hold onto. They will adjust — not because it’s fine, because it isn’t and it never will be, but because human beings are quietly extraordinary at carrying what they never chose. Those children will build their toolkit the hard way and far too early, the way some of us did. Some of us learn about change without any guidance at all, and we survive it, and we CAN go on to be softer with other people because of it.

And they won’t be doing it alone. Around them is a mother holding every one of them while carrying her own grief, and a whole community that turned up at a hospital without being asked.

That’s the other half of the truth. Change comes whether we’re ready or not. But so do people.

The three things that have stayed with me

I’ve turned this over a great deal in the weeks since I got home, and three things keep surfacing.

1. What I think I see is not fact

I built a whole character out of one awkward evening and a story that turned out not to be true. My perception of Nina was never Nina. It was a story I wrote, using almost no information, and then believed.

This is worth taking seriously, because we do it constantly — with strangers, with colleagues, with family, with the person who didn’t reply to our message. So when you notice a strong feeling rising up about somebody, it’s worth pausing to ask: is this their whole self? Is this even them? Or is this a me thing?

Almost always, there’s more going on than we can see. Almost always, we’re only holding a fragment.

And the difference between Sarah and me is not that she’s a better person than I am. It’s that she checked. She was handed a story about me from my ex, felt something wasn’t right, and went and found out. I was handed a story about someone, felt nothing much either way, and carried it around unexamined for a year. One of those takes a small amount of courage. The other takes nothing at all — which is exactly why most of us do it.

Although, to be fair to myself for a moment: Sarah and I had a bond. Nina was a stranger to me. It is a great deal easier to go and check on someone you love than on someone you met once, briefly, at somebody else’s house.

But that argument falls apart the second I look at my own life.

Because I have had people who have known me since the day I was born believe things about me that were simply not true. People with decades of evidence about exactly who I am, and what I’m like, and what I would and wouldn’t do — who took the story instead of the person. Nobody rang. Nobody asked. Nobody said that doesn’t sound like her, let me find out.

That is honestly why I live in Lincoln and not in Chesterfield, where I’m from. Not one dramatic falling-out, but an accumulation of false understandings that nobody ever thought to check. I built an entire life somewhere else.

So when I say go and find out, I promise you I’m not being lofty about it. I know precisely what it costs when people don’t.

Sarah checked, and I gained a sister for life. People who’d known me forever didn’t, and now that is in the past.

Closeness guarantees nothing. The checking is the whole thing. It is such a small act, and it changes everything.

2. Change can be quick, and quiet, and beautiful

And this one isn’t about me at all — this is Sarah and Nina. I was only ever a bystander to it.

In twelve months, an awkward and slightly frosty first meeting between the two of them had become a real friendship. Nobody announced it. Nobody made a thing of it. It simply happened, in the ordinary way that closeness grows when people keep showing up for each other — and in their case, when one of them showed up at a hospital without being asked.

I love that. A relationship that started rocky became something genuinely warm, and I only found out by walking into a room and being greeted like an old friend by a woman I thought was a stranger to Sarah.

3. The biggest change of all was completely invisible

This is the one that floored me.

This woman had been through the single most devastating upheaval a parent can experience — and I sat in a room with her for an hour and did not sense a thing. Not a flicker. She was chatty and present and funny.

I said as much to Sarah a few days later, still shaken by it. I just can’t believe I didn’t pick up on anything.

Sarah said she’s on the go constantly — holding her other children’s grief, holding her husband’s, holding everyone’s. And then she said something that’s stayed with me too: she can’t do this for much longer. Nobody can.

She’s probably right. Although I’d also say we’re capable of far more than we know.

But the point stands. Because I was busy focusing on something small (the confusion in changed relationship dynamic between Nina and Sarah), I completely missed something enormous. And whatever Nina was carrying that morning, she was carrying it underground, where none of us could see it. I think about Nina a lot, and send love to her entire family often.

We are sold a finish line

Here’s what I think makes change so much harder than it needs to be.

We’re sold a story, from very early on, that life is a thing you build and then maintain. Work hard, get the job, meet the person, buy the house, have the family, pay it off — and then you arrive. You’ve made it. And from that point the job is to hold it all in place, because holding it in place is what happiness is supposed to look like.

Stay the same. Keep it steady. Don’t let anything move.

But look at what we’re actually asking for there. We’re asking for the one thing that has never once happened, anywhere, to anything. Permanence isn’t rare. It doesn’t exist.

And the strange part is that we’re surrounded by the evidence, constantly. We just don’t notice it, because the changes that matter most tend to happen far too slowly to see.

You don’t have the taste buds you had as a child. They renew roughly every couple of weeks. That’s the actual, unglamorous reason you can now drink coffee, eat olives, or enjoy the things that made you gag at eight years old. You didn’t mysteriously “develop a palate.” The equipment changed underneath you.

Your skeleton isn’t the one you had ten years ago. Bone looks like the most permanent thing about us — it’s the part that lasts — and yet it’s being quietly dismantled and rebuilt all the time, roughly a tenth of it every year. The most solid thing in you is under continuous renovation and you have never once felt it happening.

Your memories aren’t recordings. Every time you bring one to mind you rebuild it, and you file it back slightly altered. So the memory you carry of your wedding day, or your child’s first day at school, isn’t the original — it’s the version you made the last time you thought about it. A copy of a copy of a copy. And you never noticed a single edit.

You don’t see yourself ageing. You look in the mirror every morning and see the same face, because one day’s worth of change is invisible. Then you find a photograph from five years ago and get a small shock. The change was happening the entire time. You were simply too close to it.

Even our words move underneath us. “Awful” once meant full of awe. “Nice” once meant foolish. Nobody was consulted, no announcement was made, and yet the meaning slid completely. Language is shifting in your own mouth right now and you will never feel it happen.

And the ground itself doesn’t stay put. On the Holderness coast in East Yorkshire, the land gives way to the sea by a couple of metres in an average year. There are villages marked on old maps that simply aren’t there any more. Nobody standing on that cliff on a Tuesday afternoon feels a thing.

Small changes don’t land. They don’t announce themselves. They very rarely feel like anything at all. But they are happening non-stop, in you and around you, whether you’re paying attention or not.

So the thing that isn’t true is the finish line. Not the change — the change was the only part ever guaranteed. It’s the idea that we’re meant to build a life and then hold it still that sets us up to fail.

None of this is new, by the way. Yoga philosophy has a word for it — parinama, meaning constant transformation. The idea that everything is always in the process of becoming something else. It isn’t a gloomy thought. It’s just an accurate one, and accuracy tends to be a relief.

Change is inevitable — all of it

And most of it is underground. It’s a friendship quietly deepening. It’s an opinion quietly dissolving. It’s a person quietly reassembling themselves around a loss you’d never guess at from the way they hold a coffee cup.

Change is inevitable — the good, the bad, and the downright devastating. None of us gets to opt out. And the fact that we can’t see it in someone doesn’t mean for one second that it isn’t happening.

Which means two things, I think.

Be gentler with other people. You are never seeing the whole picture. Not once, not ever. The woman who seems standoffish, the one who cancelled again, the one who seems fine — you don’t know. You really don’t know.

And be gentler with yourself. Because if change can be that invisible in someone else, it can be that invisible in you too. You might be changing right now in ways you can’t measure or point to. Just because you can’t see progress doesn’t mean it isn’t happening underground.

Why this matters on the mat

I’ve thought about this a lot in relation to the studio.

When someone walks into a class, I have no idea what they’ve walked in from. I don’t know what happened in their car on the way over, or last winter, or twenty years ago. I don’t know whether they’re here for their body, their head, their heart, or because someone told them they should be.

And I don’t need to know. That’s the whole point.

A beginner-friendly space works precisely because it assumes nothing about you. Nobody is watching. Nobody is assessing you. You do not have to explain yourself, perform wellness, or arrive as a finished version of anything.

Yoga gave me the ability to step back and watch my own reactions rather than be run by them — to feel a judgement rise up and think ah, there’s a story I’m writing, instead of simply believing it. That skill is the reason I noticed any of this at all. It’s a big part of why I opened the studio.

And there’s no finish line on the mat either. There is no pose you arrive at and then keep forever. Your practice will be different at fifty than it was at thirty, different in grief than in joy, different on a Tuesday than it was on the Monday. That isn’t failure — that’s the whole design. The practice isn’t a thing you achieve and hold. It’s a way of meeting whatever is happening today.

Some changes announce themselves. Most don’t.

So, if you are changing - congratulations that is exactly what should be happening in this human experience. Embrace the change, breathe into it, everything will work out. You will adjust, there may be some goodbyes to places, people, versions of yourself, but you will adjust.

I hope you enjoyed this and it helped to recognise the inevitability of change. While i've touched on some big changes above with the story, not all change is big and dramatic, it can be gradual, subtle and quiet.

Come as you are — whatever you’re carrying, seen or unseen. There’s a mat here with your name on it, and nobody’s going to ask you a single question about what brought you.

Inner Lifetime is a beginner-friendly yoga studio in Lincoln. Your first class is completely free — no experience needed, no flexibility required, and no explaining yourself at the door.

Jade

xxx