I have a daydream that life’s pivotal moments come as quickly as U-turns and that they are recognizable from a distance as unavoidable, exhilarating, and immediate changes in direction. So many times, I have found myself holding my breath waiting for one of those moments to move my life in a new direction faster than I feel I am moving in the wrong one, but they never do. It’s always just a wishful delusion. As I imagine we have all seen to be true, changes are more like steep hair-pin turns on gravel mountain roads.
Changes require us to slow down, sometimes to an agonizing crawl, before we can start to twist the wheel into the curve. And, as the turn gets tighter and tighter, there comes a point that every driver begins to question if they really have control. Change demands we push through that feeling of losing control until we realize we do have a choice, even if it seems like we don’t. We could decide to stop trying, to let go of the wheel, crash, and hope we don’t die. Or, of course, there’s the choice to hold on tight, and keep turning.
The initial decision seems simple and obvious. However, doubt starts to appear when we have turned the wheel as far as we think we can, danced between adding and removing pressure from the brake, and still can’t find the end of the turn. But then we do. And we remember to breathe.
That’s the thing, we want the change to come as soon as we decide to turn our steering wheels, but it doesn’t. Change cannot be realized until after we return to our neutral state, eyes straight ahead. The choice to change is just the start, the actual change lives in the follow through after-all, self-awareness without action is surrendering to mediocrity. Change lives in the tedium that is believing the new direction is just ahead and all you need to do is go a little further. Even when every muscle in your body is telling you you’re wrong. Change is uprooting, defeating, and agonizingly hard, but staying in one place is fatal.
I have never done well with change. One of my earliest memories is of the guttural suffocation I felt when I learned my parents and I were moving out of my first childhood home. Nothing had felt so devastating to me. I was 8 or 9 at the time. I was standing in the cubby of a hallway next to the kitchen which led to my bedroom, a bathroom, and another room. The two children of the couple that was buying the house were standing with me. I don’t remember who asked what, or what was said, but I do remember exclaiming my disapproval about the move, and subsequently throwing my head backwards into the wall, repeatedly. I remember it hurt. Eventually, of course, I fell just as much in love with the house we moved into as I had with the one we left behind. My lesson was two-fold, first, hitting your head on a wall hurts and second, of course, that the space itself isn’t what’s important, what’s important is the memories the space contains. Life lessons aside, I still saw change as the enemy.
I am proud, and humbled, that, while I still would not call change my “friend”, it has become more like my highly effective therapist who is both objectively supportive of me, and completely indifferent to whether or not that means hurting my feelings. In part I blame the possible head injury(?), for my seeming inability to embrace change, but really, it’s more of a morbid scapegoat than anything. It is easier to blame past me for being, retrospectively, stupid, than to admit that change just hurts my feelings.
Seriously, I once cried because I no longer got, for some unimportant reason or another, to use the same strangely sweet Elmo toothpaste at my grandparents’ house. One year, I was so upset that my family’s Easter tradition routine was going to be different that I convinced my parents to drive an extra 4 hours through the night. Just so nothing about Easter would change. And don’t get me started on transitional changes. Changing from: middle school to high school (which, mind you, at my school literally meant just moving to a different hallway), college to full blown adulthood, hell, in and out of the shower.
Between my change aversion and being fueled by anxiety, a paralyzing fear of disappointing anyone, and crippling self-doubt, child me was never really in a state of mind to accept the terrifying reality that is inevitable impermanence. I know, very surprising. Because of that, though, it has really only been in the last few years that I have been able to explore my relationship with change and, oh boy, have those years held a lot more of it than I bargained for. They have definitely thrown me into the deep end of confronting change. Though, I suppose I am grateful for the practice. After all, improving is proof of living. And, since practicing means improving, as long as I am practicing, I know that I am living.
I may always have a baseline skepticism toward changes and part of me may always hold onto the daydream of them being easy, instant, and obvious, but I know I will still always be grateful for living. As a bonus, now I can watch all the hairpin changes morphing into little U-turns in my rear-view mirror and laugh, instead of cry, at the irony of it.
Keep true, live, and do.
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