It always throws me off when people I meet after years say to me that I haven’t changed a bit. “Really?”, I ask disbelievingly as my hand instinctively rises to touch the newly forming lines around my 37 year-old-eyes! In my mind, I assume I’m virtually unrecongnizable from the person I was when I knew them. Surely, you can’t have an unaltered personality when you’ve moved around as often as I’ve done and had a whole new geographical and emotional landscape every few years! To live amongst different people who expect different things from you (I’m not implying that I’ve had to become what people expect of me, heaven knows that might make life a lot easier though if I could :P) but, some can handle you with all your potency, and some you’ve got to make a bit of an effort with. You go with the flow, and as unobtrusively as water that cuts through rock, you find you’ve forged a whole new identity for yourself.
I’ve always viewed change as a good thing “theoretically”, albeit my first meetings with it are often met with much kicking and screaming – but it’s nothing I’ve resisted extendedly! Change is inevitable, change is the essence of a universe which is in motion; and to try to impose stillness on life is an act of abject futility Image may be NSFW.
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I realise that, despite a degree of being change-averse that if not for change, there wouldn’t be women’s rights, or freedom of expression, an end to apartheid or the hope of things ever getting better than the current, rather abyssmal state of affairs we find our world in!
I’ve already entered the vortex of the next change-cycle in my life. We move to Dorset, a beautiful place near the sea…a place that gets the most sunshine in all of England Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. I’ve been there for 4 hours-that’s it, and looked at homes our real estate agent had lined up for us. I know nothing about it apart from what an arbitrary page on the internet has to say! My children seem less than enthusiastic about a new school (again), and as I try to sound excited and brimming with hope about new friends, the seaside…I feel that at 7.5 and 6, they can see through me a bit and sense the guarded apprehension within! My youngest recently asked me if I’ll make new friends too, after all, I don’t go to school and I work from home. I assure her I will…I’ve always done! Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Some of my strongest friendships have been the result of us moving around.
I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that I’ve become a creature of habit-I have my routines that play out everyday in similar, unaltered rhythms. The children leave for school, I clear up the post-breakfast disarray. I play some music and make myself a coffee the way I like it. I reply to emails, I look into work that I need to get cracking on. I break for lunch. I go out or cook, I meet someone…I’m back for the children – homework, extra-curriculars, dinner, bath, stories, sleep. Time with the husband, a movie maybe! Image may be NSFW.
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Summer holidays have a way to disrupt all routine, and apart from finding constant activity/amusement for the girls, this time around, there are calls to be made, furniture to be bought; and a decison to be made about which of the 15 different mattresses that promise an uninterrupted, Utopian sleep experience is right for you! (The overkill of choice –fodder for a whole different post!)
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Oddly, I recall from my very ecclectic reading sources that universally, people who are termed ‘happy’ and ‘lucky’ are those who have a great need to break or a least challenge the status quo! (In my opinion, if you’ve managed to reach somewhere that has a Latin term defining it, don’t mess with it-stay right there! ;P ) I look at such people with unabashed reverence – even more so those who’ve managed to reach the other extreme of the bell-curve, the backpackers, homesteaders and forest foragers who live off the land (the real ones, not the ones in Hipster mags who ‘forage’ on the weekends dressed in hemp and bamboo and then return promptly to their investment banking desks adorned with hyacinths and cactii!) There do exist those who feel that by rolling their dice on life continually, they increase the chances of hitting the jackpot! Moral of the story – change is good, change is positive and to deny life it’s metamorphosis is to potentially deny it it’s hope!
So I’ll take life up on it’s ‘circumstance’ for me and go forward to build that home that I’ve dreamt of – my colour scheme, my design palette! I’ll learn new maps and find new spaces as a new accent filters its chords into my vocabulary. I’ll be the new mum at the school gate, watch my children in new uniforms at school and at ballet and know for them that this time, it’s here to stay! Mountains alter, oceans grow and shrink and the universe softly stretches on…nature’s time runs parallel to ours. And through our own individual tangos – life’s embraces and improvisations, we all still remain connected; unchanged at our core – one big ball of irretrievably tangled yarn! x
♫ Sewn – The Feeling ♫
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You might find resonances of what I’ve been saying in some of my recent posts : “A Walk in the Clouds!” – Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland! and Retro-Chic and the Cult of Neo-Sobriety!