Another New Beginning
I was a “Navy brat” growing up. This meant that every few years, we moved.
I’m not sure that there is a kid on earth who loves moving away from their school, their friends, the things that grow familiar and comforting over time.
I was no different.
But by the time I was a teenager, I had come to realize something about the whole “moving” thing: no one at my new school knew me, so I could be whoever I wanted to be.
I could shed the things I didn’t like and try on some new personality traits and no one would be the wiser.
It was a gift. It was freedom.
Now, as it turns out, the old adage, “Wherever you go, there you are,” is as true for ninth graders as it is for anyone else, and the real me always showed up eventually.
But that “real me” had usually genuinely let go of some things that hadn’t been working and gained a little new clarity around how she wanted to show up in the world.
And really, that’s pretty huge.
As I grew older, that ability to gain a fresh start, a “do-over” of sorts by moving was something I reached for time and again.
When I was graduating from law school and filling out my paperwork to sit for the bar exam, they required that I list an address for every place I’d lived from age 18 to present. I’d listed 22 addresses and hadn’t finished yet by the time I decided I wasn’t going to sit for the exam and it didn’t matter.
In other words, I moved a lot in my twenties.
Eventually, I realized that new beginnings don’t always require uprooting everything. That sometimes “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” isn’t actually the best way to achieve the changes I’m after.
So I began to look for the smaller “fresh starts” that are available to us in our regular day-to-day lives.
As it turns out, they are everywhere.
New year, new season, new month, new week, new day…each one is a natural invitation to look at where we are and make a conscious choice about where we want to go.
Every single breath we take is an opportunity to pause, to evaluate, to reset, to make a different choice.
We are surrounded by places to begin all day, every day.
Here in Washington, today marks the first phase of things opening back up. State parks and other areas are opening with guidelines for distancing in place.
Regardless of how you might feel about this— whether it’s too soon or not soon enough— it seems to me like the beginning of our next stage.
Which I see as an opportunity to do some evaluating and deciding:
What have I been learning during this pandemic (about myself, my world, my life, my outlooks, etc)?
What do I want to remember about this?
What lessons do I want to take with me moving forward?
What things do I want to leave behind as I move forward?
There is quote from a Joan Didion book that has stayed with me over the years:
“I think we are all well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat…the other one, a twenty-three-year-old bothers me more...” ~Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook
We really do forget things that, in the moment, we truly believe we could never forget. Time is funny like that.
So as we move into this next stage, as spring blooms around us and seasons change, as new days break each dawn, I hope you’ll give some time and attention to whatever new beginning you want for yourself.
Maybe it’s a big fresh start— a different job or partnership or home.
Maybe it’s more subtle— increased connection or gratitude or a settling into your own skin with acceptance and love.
Maybe it’s a mix of a bunch of different things.
We have the power to begin again as many times as we need to, over and over.
To reinvent ourselves and our lives. To learn and grow and change.
We’re allowed— I’m allowed to change my mind and so are you.
About pretty much anything at all. There are no real rules to this thing.
What are you beginning? What are you ready to let go of?
Stay curious out there, my friends.