Reinvention: Turning Points, Callings, Fear and Faith

Change

1 comment

I am writing because I have to.  I need to.  It's how I sometimes process things that feel too big: talking out loud, writing in a diary, here in a blog where the people you value might have some nugget of wisdom to clear the smoke.  Right now I'm listening to one of my favourite songs:  "Change" from Tracy Chapman's "Where You Live" CD.  I've tucked the lyrics in with this pic on Flickr.

Rambling alert: this is the "talking out loud" part ...

The past few months have been increasingly chaotic.  It's an odd thing to say when the past year was actually one of profoundly poor health, and this is the part where I'm supposed to breathe easier because I'm getting better and most days feel pretty damned great.  Thing is I'm having one of those "Aha!" moments where you cannot breathe at all because you're hovering between the grief of leaving the old and familiar behind, and that incredible feeling of anticipating when you're brave enough to let yourself imagine new things.

Why is it so hard to change?

If you're not entirely happy with the status quo, with parts of yourself or your life or your choices, then why is it so damned hard to let them go?  Human nature is contained in such a predictable set of boxes at times, one of the big ones being this false sense of safety and normalcy so long as we keep doing what we're doing, whether it makes us happy or not.  We learn to a certain extent to control things and survive them by developing a handful of coping strategies.  Sometimes that means giving up on dreams, or unhooking important parts of ourselves like feelings or needs or pieces of our character that are actually very important parts of who we are.  I know because I've done this, over and over and over again, for years.

I have little notes scrawled on pieces of paper around my desk, tucked into favourite books, slipped under a coffee cup.  One of the ones staring back at me accusatorily right now says this:  "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results".  Pretty damned wise.  So why is it so hard to take to heart and translate into some sort of meaningful "do something"?

Do something.

I've said that phrase hundreds of times.  I'm usually saying it in light of my role as a better world scout.  It's a challenge statement as much as an invitation, and rolls off my lips as easy as could be ... until I listen to it in the context of my own life.

In March of 2003 I was driving home and stopped the car only two blocks from my house.  I turned and looked at my kids and said "something big is coming.  I don't know what.  I don't know what it means for us, but I know it's going to turn our lives upside down and we have to be ready".  A week later I got the phone call.  My mum was dying and my father had collapsed, and I had to go home to ... well ...

I had to leave my own family behind, young kids, and make unspeakable choices for my parents that haunt me to this day.  Not to belabour the details of that time in my life, but I'm thinking of it now because there is that same sense of ominous foreshadowing going on the past few days, and it leaves me restless and full of anxiety.

I don't do well with the unknown.  I'd rather have the difficult news full on, however bad it might be, so I can begin to wrap my head around it and prepare.  Essentially I am a control freak, and what I know I can set into order to whatever extent I can.  I don't like my back against a wall.  I don't like not having thought things through so that I can react intelligently and safely and sanely when the time comes, whatever "it" might be.

What's driven me to sit myself down and simply write about this today is sort of the perfect storm of coincidences in my life at the moment: personal, professional, community, all of it.  It's like the universe is conspiring to dump me the hell out of that comfy bed where I'm hiding under the covers and right onto my feet pointing, frowning, saying "Choose!"

Sounds like a whole lot of hubris going on ... ~laughs~ ... but this is in fact how it feels right this moment.  Sometimes coasting along is okay, if the choices that placed you there were healthy and wise.  Sometimes it's just lazy and irresponsible, and at the moment, I guess I'm leaning toward the latter.  I've got a handful of decisions to make.  Some of them are really bloody hard.  Other's have been taken out of my hands completely.  In any case, here I am, at a turning point, recognizing that like it or not it's time to choose, and if I'd let myself believe it, the perfect time to see the opportunities I've just not been brave enough to consider.

Am I brave enough to walk away from a career that's made me a public figure and provided me with some of the most incredible moments of serendipity in my life?  Do I have enough faith to believe that I've got the power to create something better and that really fits?  Do I have the power to walk away from an online community of better world scouts that I've been part of for three years and that is soon shutting it's doors, and figure out "what next?"  Do I have the power to imagine myself as something other than a fulltime mum when that part of my life is over so very soon?  Am I brave enough and do I have enough faith to hang in there with personal relationships that are in turmoil because of life's changes?

I've always considered myself to be strong, brave, a person with great conviction and faith.  Today I'm sitting quietly, feeling very uncertain, and recognizing just how comfortable it's been to live with the status quo.  Thing is, it hasn't made me very happy.

So now what?

I'm trying very hard to dig down deep to see if I have what it takes to reinvent once again, not on one front, but on many, maybe simultaneously.  I've watched someone I care about very much doing exactly that, not easily, but bravely.  It gives me hope, and yet I feel like such a coward.  What's familiar is comfortable.  Sometimes you have the luxury of choosing to piss your life away continuing to walk that path until it's very deep rut and almost impossible to get out of.  Sometimes the choice is taken out of your hands.  In any case, when you're standing there at that turning point, it's scary as hell.

Mostly, this is just talking out loud because it's how I wrap my head around things that I really don't want to be thinking about at all.  Doing it in my blog is admitting I don't have it all figured out, and because I'm wondering how other people find the courage to make big changes in their life and get on with it.

I think I've nearly worn the tracks off of Chapman's "Change", and yet I just looped it again, because I still need to hear it.  I really need to hear it today.