An Encouragement for Those Who Are Really Bad At Change

If I had to catalog the things I really don’t enjoy, “change” of any kind and/or degree, would always make the short list.

Photo Credit: wondersofsam, Creative Commons

I started thinking about the big changes I remember in my life and it’s comical how similar my memories of these moments are, in that they pretty much all involve tears. In everything from crying in the driveway with a best friend before I left for college to biting my lip standing in our new kitchen last year when my husband and I moved (to a house on the same block of the same street, mind you)—

Change is not my forte.

Because I’ve always had a hard time with it, I have often treated my aversion to change like something I needed to conquer, to overcome completely so I could be one of those adventurous, brave, awesome people who just can’t wait for all the new experiences.

It felt wrong for it to be momentarily heart-wrenching to enter new seasons—not ones brought on by something traumatic or devastating, but the good, natural, inevitable shifts that move us through life and help us grow—transitions it seems many people take right in stride as exhilarating and fun.

In what was the changey-est season of my life to date—

I had just graduated college, and was about to get married and move to a new state all in the span of about a month. (Today, our party line about this quick succession of major life events is, “Whooo whee! It didn’t seem as crazy to us then as it does now!” Alternate: “Who let us do that?!”)

I remember one afternoon during the weeks anticipating all those big tick marks on life’s timeline when I began to let myself off the hook a little bit on the not-good-at-change thing.

For the first time, it dawned on me that it was ok to admit that transition can be bittersweet.

Even when we’re going from good thing to good thing—

it’s all right for the closing of one chapter to elicit a little sadness. In fact, in a way that seems backwards at first—that sadness itself can be a way of being thankful for something that was sweet and meaningful enough to merit being a smidge sad over.

The last night with the college roommates and the final ride in the first car (still mourning my ’93 Ford Explorer) don’t have to be events we skim over as we fast-forward to what’s next, but instead can be moments whose very celebration might involve a couple of tears.

Those bittersweet moments can be a celebration of their own, in a way.

I have this urge to scoot all the hard and challenging parts of life over into one corner, nice and neat, and keep the fun and easy and perfectly pleasant parts in another.

Unfortunately, real experience hardly ever stays in the corners and categories I make for it.

Part of what makes change daunting is forgetting that good changes can come mixed up with sadness, and still be good changes. For me, encountering change gracefully means neither magically making myself ecstatic-only, nor getting bogged down in glory-days-nostalgia.

Instead, it means going ahead and owning the bittersweet-ness up front—celebrating what’s before me because I’ve nodded to the best parts of what brought me there.

By learning to look transition right in the eye, and see the value of the season that’s going at the same time that I anticipate the good that is to come, I’ve gotten a little better at finding my footing when life moves forward.