Change
Two days into the new year, and I’m already behind. Normally I write my penny posts over the weekend to publish Monday morning. But a big winter storm forced us to change our travel plans, which meant I spend all day Sunday driving rather than writing. So goes the battle.
It’s the first of what I’m sure will be hundreds if not thousands of adjustments I’ll have to make in 2023. After nearly 49 years of tripping across time and chance, I’ve come to expect change as the rule rather than the exception.
Last week’s trip to my hometown brought this home in a big way. It’s been almost three years since I’ve ventured out much past the family farm on our annual post-Christmas trip to Charleston, AR. This time around, however, I drove all over the area running errands and visiting friends.
Just looking out the car window gives plenty of evidence or the transience of human endeavors. What used to be a wide-open hayfield is now a fully populated subdivision, while a once thriving neighborhood has become a near ghost town. Businesses change names and owners and locations. A home to the south of Mom’s place has collapsed. To the north, someone has installed rows of chicken houses.
Even more profound are the changes in the lives of friends I haven’t seen in years. Many of the conversations I had last week centered around big changes to our lives—births and deaths, weddings and divorces, dumb luck and near misses. One friend told me about her mother’s dementia and her father’s denial of it. Another is grappling with the dissolution of her faith community. With a few rare exceptions, everyone I talked with had either started a new job or was looking for one, so pervasive is vocational dissatisfaction.
These middle-life upheavals are, I suspect, no less expected and no more intense than the ones at any age. Even a cursory look back at my 20s is enough to remind me that the good old days weren’t always so good. I struggled then as I struggle now, and probably more so, since I lacked the experience and wisdom currently at my disposal.
On the other hand, the extra couple of decades has given me more time to see how the world has changed, more context in which to mourn the things we’ve lost. I recognize now that I have much less control over my future than I once thought. I am more aware than ever of how complicated and uncertain life is. So much of what I once took for granted doesn’t even exist anymore. Even as an ardent scoffer at nostalgia, I find that sad.
But I also find it insanely hopeful.
That may sound crazy, especially to those who walked with me through some of the more tumultuous crises of my 2022. I promise it’s true, though.
However much my friends and I are tempted to dwell upon the negative changes we’re enduring, there’s no denying the positive things that have happened over the past several years. While a long way from financially secure, most of us no longer have to scrounge for change under the car seat to buy a late night taco. One couple just retired, adopted new puppies, and promptly went back to school to pursue other interests. Another launched their daughter successfully into young adulthood. My friend Billy, always a wandering soul, has a new boat, a sweet sleeve of tattoos, and a cubic crap-ton of hard-won wisdom to share.
Look back a couple of decades, and none of these things were on the near horizon. Now they are accomplished fact. Life has changed a lot, sometimes for the worse but just as often for the better.
We forget that, all the time. I forget that.
Neil Pasricha warns us about the end-of-history illusion—the false assumption that things will remain the same from this point forward. Regardless of what we know rationally, our emotions get stuck on the notion that what we feel—especially negative things such as loss and uncertainty—will continue on into infinity.
But, to use an illustration from Dan Gilbert, we can’t see staircase we’re ascending, not while we’re climbing it. We can only see and analyze the steps we’ve already taken. What’s ahead is dark and unknowable, which makes it terrifying. Time and again, studies suggest we’d rather choose a negative outcome than risk an uncertain one. To do otherwise takes a courage few of us ever develop.
I’m working on it, though. You probably are too.
I can’t say how things will change in 2023. I imagine a fair amount of consistency with 2022, but there will no doubt also be some big differences. I’m less certain about the future than I was at this time last year, which is scary as hell but also liberating. I will no doubt lose some things I cherish, but I will also shift toward good things I never imagined.
The first two days of the new year have not gone as planned. But I am safely back home, finally getting to write as the snow piles up outside my window. It’s a peaceful scene, and also a reminder of impermanence. Not too many weeks from now, the weather will warm and the snow will melt, and we’ll have to deal with a slushy mess once it does.
Still, today is beautiful. Tomorrow will be different.
And also beautiful.
