Big Change

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about change. For some time now, I’ve been feeling a very strong urge to make a major change, a redirection of my life. It seemed increasingly like this meant leaving Ukraine, but I haven't had a good vision of what would be next if I left. Plus, I've had this nagging feeling that I still have unfinished business here.

But a pretty big change is now underway. In less than two weeks, I will be leaving the apartment I’ve called home for more than eight years to move into a new place. This isn’t as big a change as moving to another country, but changing apartments will suffice for now until the future becomes clearer.

Another reason for thinking about change is that this week will mark 10 years since I sold my dream home in the mountains of Colorado to make the move to Ukraine. One sunny day in late July, 2007, after all the papers had been signed and money exchanged, and after final packing and cleaning, I drove away from that beautiful place for the last time.

I still feel some sadness when I think of the sacrifice I made. But then, just as now, I had a strong need for change, and the change I was making required me to sell the house and be financially free to go off on my new adventure. It was all about change – it was always about change.

Change: the Only Thing that Doesn’t Change

A very well-known saying holds that “the only constant is change.”

Things change around us constantly. Usually the changes are small, building up over time. You never really see the changes in your own face in the mirror day after day, but look at a photo from 10 years ago and you wonder what the hell happened.

Everything changes. Our circles of friends and acquaintances change. The people who were part of my close circle at the start of this Ukrainian adventure are now either on the fringe or gone altogether. One is still a very real part of my world but living far away. The people around me now are different. It’s all changed.

Over the course of years, things can change so much that when you recall past people, places and events, you wonder whether they really happened at all. The present can be so different that those past episodes of your life seem more like dreams or movies than reality. I wrote more about this in a post several years ago called Life at the Speed of Time.

Major Change

Most of the change in our lives happens in small, gradual steps over time. But the changes that really get our attention are the big ones, the changes that are so great that they abruptly set us off in a new direction. These are the changes that represent milestones in our lives, things like graduating from college, getting married, having children, getting divorced, changing jobs, changing where you live, and of course, the death of someone close.

Some people really embrace big change; they become bored with their routines and find that a big change energizes them and makes life more interesting again. For most of my life, this has been my story.

Others resist change. They find comfort in being grounded, in having the safety and security of knowing what to expect tomorrow, in having everything be stable. They don’t like their boat to be rocked. Instead of being energized by change and looking forward to something better, they are terrified that things will be worse.

And there are others who are not really afraid of change but just don’t want to make the effort to change things. Maybe at one time they were the people who needed the energy that change brings, but now they’ve become kind of lazy and just settle for how things are. I fear that I’ve become this person in recent years.

Behind Schedule

As I mentioned at the beginning, I’ve been feeling an overriding need for change for at least the first half of this year, maybe longer. I’ve been feeling dissatisfied with certain aspects of my life fow some time and have gone too long without shaking up my world. Looking back, it seems that I had some kind of big shakeup at least every couple of years. Usually it involved changing my work – not just my job, but even my career – or the place I lived. Sometimes it meant relationship changes.

I’ve gone from student to naval intelligence officer to student (again); to public relations, lottery management and marketing communications; to project management in mining engineering and environmental remediation (with more government and public relations thrown in); to business management; and finally to teaching English as a second language. The only constant among all of those careers was my writing and editing work, but the styles certainly changed.

The biggest changes were in where I’ve lived. Growing up in a small Massachusetts town where the idea of an “exotic” trip was going to Cape Cod or New York, no one could have imagined that I’d not only visit so much of the world, but actually live in so many far-flung places: Colorado, California, Texas, Illinois, Japan, Guam, Peru, and a few others. And, of course, Ukraine.

If I wasn’t taking a new career direction, I was moving to some new locale – or sometimes back to a previous one for a time. But never for too long. After a two-year stint back in Massachusetts in the mid-1990s, I settled back into another 10-year stretch in beautiful Colorado. But in those 10 years, I lived in three different places, from an apartment in Denver, to a new house in the suburbs south of the city, and finally to my dream home in the mountains to the west.

Something always had to change. I always seemed to have an itch. I would be satisfied with a situation for some time, but then after a while I would feel that it wasn’t enough. There was always something more that I needed.

Maybe that’s why I’ve been so restless the past few years. I’ve lived in Kharkiv for almost all of the past decade and in one apartment since May 2009. For me, that’s a very long time. And I’ve been doing essentially the same work for even longer.

Maybe I’ve slowed down with age and don’t have the same passion for change that I used to have. Or maybe I’ve just gotten complacent and lazy. But no matter which it might be, change is coming, and I do feel excited.

One of the benefits of making one big change is that in the process you can take that energy of change and apply it to a bunch of small things too. That energy might be enough to help you turn those small changes into lasting habits for a better direction.

That’s the plan.

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