Change

I took a trip home to upstate New York this past week to visit with family and friends. It was great to see everyone, truly. But it was an unfamiliar experience for me, too, because I've never lived as far from home as I do now, and I haven't ever gone as long as I did, furthermore, without coming home for a visit. In that regard, it was an unexpectedly strange experience: things were familiar, but I wasn't. And it wasn't a major shift I perceived within myself, either; it was subtle, as if a sea captain had changed the ship's course a mere degree or two.

Awareness of the role I've played in relation to my family and friends kept occurring to me during my visit, which led me, in turn, to consider more generally the nature of self in relation to the external world, and the roles we assume in all our social interactions. (Not coincidentally, a book entitled, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman is coming up on my reading list.) I also found that I was revisiting what I learned in graduate school about Murray Bowen's Family Systems Theory (click here to learn about it from his organization -- it's very interesting stuff).

I digress.

What I found during my visit was that I was able to sort of measure my personal change based on the subtle dissonances I perceived in my cognition and emotional processing while in (temporary) relation to my surroundings back home. Actually, I don't think I measured it as much as I simply perceived it. Old habits of mind, imperceptibly shed since moving to Colorado, felt unfamiliar. I was caught off guard by them, too, because I hadn't even realized I was shedding them.

It dawns on me now that this post is about change, plain and simple. I'm changing, and my trip home helped illustrate the fact.

You know what? That's a validating thought, and I think it's pretty damn cool. Change can be difficult to contend with, you know? It requires, by definition, that something be altered, and most of us tend to like our familiarity. Moreover, it seems to me that this little realization of mine is in keeping with the nature of life, which is, after all, a continual process of things changing. To build walls against change is natural, I suppose, but change must be yielded to, sooner or later. Huh.

I'm grateful to be getting out my own way, and letting myself be moved, consciously, by life.