"Change is chaos!""Change is life."
"Change is a #@$&*!"
Change is a blessing!"
The cliches abound. And the important thing about cliches is, despite their irritating overuse and simplistic view, they are—at least in part—true.
Don't you hate that about them?
The truth of the change cliches above came home this past week as my wife and I underwent a forced transition from carefree, secure, vacationing tourists gallivanting about the Texas hill country into fraught, frantic, and furloughed wanderers whose lives had been upended by the turbulence of a government shutdown.
Okay, I was fraught and frantic. O wondrous wife of mine, the one actually furloughed, faced our return rather calmly. While I ranted, raved, and turned several shades of purple sputtering mangled and senseless expletives at the politicians on television who made excuses for the shutdown, she calmly pulled out the laptop and began revising her resume and checking out job openings elsewhere outside the federal government.
She's learned much more from the changes in her life than I have from mine, particularly how to deal with adversity.
In the eleven years we've known each other, she's taught me to recognize that despite all the upheaval we've endured separately and together, we will get through this and all will work out for the good.
I don't want to admit that, but it's true.
Truth can be so annoying, especially when you want to wallow in misery. "C'mon, God! I just wanna wallow!"
Numerous times our lives have changed, both purposely and passively, both beneficially and adversely. All of them contributed to making us who we are today. To illustrate, let's look at four areas of change (career, health, relationship, family life) and the payoff they brought:
Career: When you're 18, you think you know what you want to do with your life. However, when you start post-secondary school, you begin to wonder. Then when you actually go to work ... Yikes!
On my first day on a job, when everything started falling over my head like a downpour of sticky, runny oatmeal, I just wanted to smash my mushy forehead with an open palm and scream, "What was I thinking?" So I changed track a few dozen times, each time cleaning off the same mushy oatmeal and starting over, until I found the job that allowed me to truthfully say, "I GET to go to work today." The truth is I would never have found that job had I not accepted changes brought on by the strange meteorological phenomenon of oatmeal precipitation.
Relationship: Adolescence is marked with relationship changes that are confounding and sometimes stupefying. Then comes adulthood and the really messed-up stuff happens ... at least it's messed up until you learn from the changes you've encountered before. Before meeting each other, my wife and I had both been married and divorced. We both endured subsequent failed relationships. But when we finally gave up trying so hard to "find the right person," when we finally stopped looking "for our type," the right type showed up.
Health: Life is a dangerous occupation. It seems as if nobody gets out of it alive. When faced with life-threatening experiences, in our cases a traffic accident and a stroke, one could give up or he/she could accept the challenges, face the hazards, and move on. We both chose the latter. Doing so, we realized the blessing of existence.
Family life: Family members come and go. Children are born, mature, and go off to live their own lives. Parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, grow old and pass on. There is joy and there is pain. Amidst it all is family. And family is a blessing
The pay-off: Through the trials and tribulations of using cliches like "trials and tribulations" to describe how change affects your life, it's all right to maintain a safe and comfortable contentment. Nothing exuberant or nutzoid. Simply content.
But to be perfectly honest, contentment is boring and pointless. The aim of life is not simply to exist, but to excel; not to seek contentment, but to seek joy. And when you accept and even embrace change, you can find it.
There are dangers, I can assure you. Hugging a cactus or a porcupine hurts, but sometimes the result can be tremendous.
Don't ask me what. When I first wrote this, I lived in urban Minnesota where there were few porcupines and even fewer cacti. It's hard to imagine hugging either. But I do know that accepting change has graced my life with family, friends, and a satisfaction I could never have found without it.
So in the face of the shutdown furlough, my wife and I move on to whatever change can bring us.
I will continue to write, looking for ways to improve my art by changing genre, style, format, wording ... whatever will make it better.
My wife will look for what work options are available, and in the meantime she'll wait patiently and blog about a variety of things at her site Managing Forward (http://managingforward.blogspot.com).
In Washington, the powers that be (at least temporarily) can fuss and fume, fluster and flail wildly about, accomplishing little or nothing. The Storyteller family will carry on, knowing this too will change and somehow we'll be the better for it.
We will hug the cactus of change and we will be joyful.
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