My alarm sounded and I climbed out of the top bunk I had slept in since I was seven. It wasn’t a typical day but I did all the typical things that formed the routine I kind of had. I showered and got dressed and then waited for Mom and Dad to say it was time to go.
The moment came, and as I walked out the back door of our farm house I told myself I wouldn’t look back. As I walked I looked straight ahead and when I climbed into the front seat of the van I closed my eyes until the house was behind me. I wouldn’t look back. My whole world was changing and I was terrified but certain I was going to embrace the future.
In my immature eighteen year old brain I had just spent my last night in my parents house. I was heading to college and it was the end of an era in my life. I would never come home again.
I was gone for a month before I was home for a weekend and in the same bed I had slept in for years. I spent a lot of nights in that same bed for several more years as I faced a lot of change.
When I was younger I didn’t like change. That day leaving for college wasn’t thrilling. I still don’t go looking for change but I accept it when it arrives and sometimes I do seek it out.
I’m not alone either. Our culture is full of sayings, “The good old days…, I remember when…, I wish it could be like it used to be.” They are all notions built on our feeling that change is the enemy.
I wonder what it is that makes change so hard… Is it the fear of the future? We don’t know what is coming or if we will be able to handle whatever it is. We can. We have a whole life time behind us that says we can endure what is coming. We never knew what was ahead of us but we still made it. You didn’t know you would struggle in school. You didn’t know you would have an addiction that would steal a piece of your life, but you’re still here. Someone could have told you, “You’re going to be an amazing mom,” and you laughed at them — but now you are loved by your children. We didn’t know, and yet we made the future our present.
I think the pain of change is more about what we are losing. Where the future is unwritten, the past and present we know and we are comfortable with them. I know how to respond to what has already happened to me. If you start changing things, I’m going to lose things — stability, comfort, an excuse. If things change then I may hurt or someone I know may hurt.
We are a people that avoid pain at all cost, but we shouldn’t. Pain reminds us there is life and it is worth living and worth fighting for.
Here is some advice for the seasons or moments of change…
Don’t go it alone. We were not meant to be lone wolves; we are communal creatures and humanity would be better served if we lived that way. Speak out your fears and the things you will mourn in the midst of the disruption. Share each others burdens.
Don’t let anger rule the day. Change is going to happen. As the old saying goes, you never enter the same river twice. Anger is wasted energy in the world of change, because anger rarely makes things better, it clouds our perceptions and feeds our fears.
Do look for reasons to be excited. The fact that tomorrow will be different from today should stir our sense of adventure. Tomorrow is a chance to make something new, or build on a stronger foundation.
Do invite someone to share in your delight. As Paulo Coelho wrote, “Happiness is something that multiplies when it is divided.”
We only pass through this life once and change is part of the process.