A friend of mine has been enduring several seriously big professional and personal life changes the last few weeks, which as you can imagine is pretty stressful at any time of the year, but especially in close proximity to the holidays. We were fortunate enough to share a little mini-holiday this weekend, away from our homes, but without traveling. I suspect it was very nice for everyone involved, including Diana and Simon, to just turn off our collective brains for a little while.
Quite frankly, my little family unit has been in a series of constant transitions since 2007, when Diana and I first met. The hardest, scariest and ultimately most rewarding of these transitions was easily our move to Seattle, and birth of Simon a few months later. All of the moving and other changes after that were certainly stressful at times, but in all honesty, change has become a lot easier for me.
Today I realized that I arrived in Orlando exactly six months ago. Given the amount of adventure we've seen in that time, without even leaving the area, it seems like much longer. The transition was pretty easy, for me at least, and now we're prepared to make one more transition as we move into our first house that is truly our own. I very much want our living space to be a stable thing for a long time to come, but I suppose now I believe that anything can happen.
That's the thing that makes transitions hard. They typically mean the start of something new at the expense of something ending. That's an extraordinarily difficult thing to accept, that some things simply can't coexist at the same time. I can't help but think of that in terms the many addresses we've had. If I could only simultaneously live in Seattle and Orlando, while simultaneously having access to Cedar Point and my friends there, I would have the greatest possible situation. But absent absurd wealth, that's really not possible.
The crazy thing about transitions is that they can often be of your own choosing, but they can be a lot harder when you don't choose them. People can get laid off, people close to you die, relationships crumble... there's no end to the variety of things you can encounter. I think that's where you can become stronger, by mastering your own destiny where it's possible. It's less scary to deal with the change when you initiate it, and by extension, the things you can't control become a little easier because you've learned to adapt.
I had a good weekend. I feel a little better equipped to handling the transitions coming my way.
No comments yet.