Given Over to Ecstacy

Sometimes you find a glimmer of insight in an unlikely place.

For me, that unlikely place is my workplace. Unlikely because everything is driven by results and deadlines, so there’s not a lot of room in the day for drifting off in thought.

I had a phone meeting (with coworkers who were sitting, literally, steps away from me) about making some deep changes to some of our established work processes, and afterward I came away with a feeling that I’d stumbled on to something pretty fundamental to my own method of working and, indeed, living.

In the meeting, as a joke, I’d remarked that we would be better off wiping everything clean and starting totally fresh. Our processes tend toward the byzantine because we have a few members of our group who get rather loud and obnoxious when presented with change. I, by contrast, tend to have no sympathy at all for such folk, and I find myself playing joyfully close to the nerve in suggesting radical or even catastrophic change.

After the meeting, I realized such chaotic joy wasn’t just me making light. I found myself feeling fairly ecstatic about the prospect of chucking everything out the window and starting totally anew. Indeed, I couldn’t help chuckling to myself such that my boss asked me in her semi-concerned voice what I was up to.

There’s no mistaking it: Change hurts. It’s violent and it’s hard to do well. It’s hard to be yourself when you’re in the midst of change and it’s even harder to be around others. Our brains fix themselves on survival and so it’s difficult indeed to carry on a decent conversation when all you feel like doing is curling up in a ball.

But with all that, there’s freedom. And I think this is the part that makes me excited. Change makes impermanent that which we were sure would exist forever. As the book of our lives is written, the ink fades on those early pages as we become less and less of who we were then. Sometimes this is disturbing, because we like knowing we have history. But after that, there’s excitement in knowing that new history is yet to be written. Exciting to think about what to fill the next empty page with.

It’s interesting that I would feel this way because I was brought up to cherish security, routine. Indeed, change was typically a bad thing even if the event itself was supposed to be good. For example, having a baby is generally seen as a good thing, but the wholesale change the event introduces lasts for years, which is not so good. For good or ill, I was raised to perceive change as like ripples that could potentially capsize the boat of my life, transform into waves and drown me. So, if change did occur, I had to stop the rippling as quickly as possible. That’s how responsible people handle change, after all. They work their entire lives to upgrade from the dinghy they were born with to, finally, the battleship they retire on. Because, a solid steel battleship with massive gun turrets of financial security can handle most any change, right?

Anyone who knows the story of my life knows that assumption hasn’t worked out well. My life has been filled to brimming with change, as most lives are. I’ve never been able to control the rippling and I’ve all but given up trying to. The whole battleship upgrading game, I’ve decided, doesn’t apply to me simply because it’s based on the assumption of no change happening, ever, in the process.

As I get older, I find that:

• Change is normal.
• Radical or catastrophic change is the rule rather than the exception.
• Living your life as if you’re in a lovely little bubble where the value of everything always increases is delusional at best and dangerous at worst.

Knowing all this makes me blanch a bit when I think about it for too long.  But I understand I can’t insulate myself from it — at least, not like my parents did. Indeed, sometimes it gets to a point where the only thing to do is figure out how to love it.

So, that’s what I’m trying to do, now that the year is nearly at an end and I feel the vibrations of some fairly big changes approaching. When I think about the worst-case scenario (losing everything such that I have to live in my car for an extended period of time), it’s not truly the worst thing that can happen (like, dying). It just feels like it because it really, REALLY sucks to feel failure and start over completely.

Of course, I still reserve the right, as Julian says, to freak out from time to time. But those spurts of grave insecurity are, I think, shorter and less intense now, as I become better friends with radical change.

And they’re nothing that a few hours of intense knitting can’t put right.