Growing up in a big family, and until all my siblings moved out, I had no room of my own. I slept in the dining room, the office,
the balcony, and nearly every room bar the kitchen and bathrooms. Moving to college
meant more changes, moving from dorm to dorm, from university back home, and
back to campus.
In this life of constant
change, I longed for stability, settling down in my own place. I regarded all those moves as
temporary. My life was on hold, pending a list of successive goals: finish college, get a job, get
married, and and buy house.
In my search for
stability, as I checked those boxes, I was really going against my nature, building a figment of
stability in a world that never ceased to change.
The moves continued, in the
form of travel. In each of several recent years, I made more than a dozen trips, one for each
month: some only for a day, and some a week or longer. Spending so many
weekends away from home, I longed to settle down, gravitating towards an unhappy stability, and accepting of bad situations. My distaste for change thus led me to years of an unhappy marriage and an unsatisfying job.
After my most recent
move, prompted by my divorce, I got to accept that this nomadic
life is in my nature. Wherever I am, even on the move, I am alive. If I were to
put everything on hold until stability is achieved, I am throwing my life away.
Today I befriended change again.
[adapted from a post written on the day I moved out of my married house, for good]
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