Jonathan Dodd‘s latest column. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
We’re moving this week, so please forgive me if I seem a little distracted. We’re staying on the Island, just moving further north. I’ve heard people say that moving house is one of the most stressful life experiences you can go through, but I don’t feel it like that. It’s inefficient, expensive, time-consuming and frustrating, but it’s all about change. And Change Is Good.
The thing is that you choose a place to live for very good reasons. It seems like the best place you can find, and you quickly settle in, and generally you’re very happy there. Or at least contented. But then your life or circumstances change, and you need to move house accordingly.
Sometimes we need to move
Sometimes you outgrow the place you live, or it becomes too big, as families spread or shrink. New people come into your life, or familiar faces disappear, for whatever reason. You change your job, or lose it, or get a better one. You become healthier, or your options shrink. All these things make us rethink our circumstances, and sometimes we need to move.
Moving house seems to me to be similar in many ways to buying or selling anything else. You wait until someone wants to buy your current model, and you research financial possibilities before selecting the next one. Then you carry out the exchange, and get on with your new life.
Where are you going to park the car?
There’s obviously some rearrangement to be made with the new place, such as who sleeps where, can you fit all your furniture and other stuff in, or do you need to make some changes. There are all the decisions about decorating and gardens and kitchens and what should be kept and what needs to be thrown away.
You’ve got unfamiliar things to think about too. Where are you going to park the car? What are the local schools like? Where’s the nearest shop? You’re going to keep some of your old friends and gain new ones, hopefully. A change of job can be unsettling too, with all the unknowns.
Never have to deal with anything new again
But the great thing about change, whether it’s a conscious decision or whether it’s forced on you by Life, is that it’s an opportunity to look at your life so far and clear your house and your head out. We humans have a terrible tendency to get things sorted and then expect to be able to sit back and never have to deal with anything new again. We all do this all the time, and we’re idiots.
I used to look at my children, and I wondered which parts of them were always there, even before they were born, and which parts had been learned since. In other words, which things had I foisted upon them and which parts I could absolve myself of blame over. Of course, there’s no way we can tell, thank goodness.
She’s exactly like you!
I had a phone conversation with my ex recently, and I said that our daughter was so like her. To me, this was completely obvious. She immediately came back with – ‘Oh no! She’s exactly like you!’ Therein lies a whole world of unknown and unpredictable stuff, and I decided not to go there.
What I eventually came up with was the idea that all children are born with certain innate understandings. For instance, we all have a very clear idea of what is beautiful, and we can mostly agree about various beautiful things. We’re also born with a very real sense of justice. Even at a very early age, I remember my children crying – ‘It’s not fair!’ I’m afraid I usually replied like this – ‘Who gave you the idea that Life was going to be fair?’
Who knows?
Who knows who’s going to be a good father or mother, or lover or friend? Who knows whether we’ll be happy or not? Who knows whether the decisions we make are going to work out or not? And who knows whether they actually worked out, but we never realised? I certainly don’t.
But I do think that we need to study ourselves, and listen to our own inner voices. Not the voices of other people we’ve installed in our heads, but we ourselves, our own true voices. These messages are clear once we tune in to our own wavelength. We’ve been listening lately, and we’ve felt the need to move. We trusted that, and once we were able to move, we looked at several properties until we found one we really liked. So that’s where we’re going to live now.
To live a life full of change
It’s exciting and scary, but above all it’s an opportunity to see how things work out, with an expectation that things will be better, and easier, and maybe even more fun. Even if it doesn’t appear to be a change for the better, we can learn from it and make another change that will get us to where we need to go.
We all have change muscles. If we don’t exercise them, they atrophy, and then when change comes along we’re in no fit state to make the most of it. To live a life full of change is to be able to sit and go over all those glorious memories. When we finally get the chance to sit down, that is.
If you have been, thank you for reading this.
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