​Change

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“Never again just this...”[i]

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           I look out my kitchen window. What has changed since yesterday? The blue, beyond believable blue, the lush and layered greens of treescapes, all of an early summer’s beauty in one gaze bounded by a window  frame. And yet, it is today. One leaf or blossom less or more, who’s to know? I was gone for two weeks, and when I came back, the luxuriant green was fuller, richer, but in a brief four months’ time, it will be golden and orange and every day, leaves will be fewer.

          “You never step into the same river twice,” someone has said.[ii] And so, I know: something has changed out there. If I can’t perceive it today, no matter. Just as I can’t perceive slow degrees of change in me—my skin or hair or thinking. But each day brings a few hairs less; my skin a little more freckled from being in the sun awhile at noon; my thinking, which is always being accosted by news or articles or phone calls or the book I’m reading—or even by what I’m writing.

           The other day was my grandparents’ wedding anniversary, some 120 years ago. When I wrote the date in my journal, I was suddenly transported back to their fiftieth. I was a little girl in a blue dotted-Swiss dress, meeting the cars in the big barnyard, carrying the presents into the house, so proud. Am I still the  same person? It’s incredible to think. Surely, that was someone else. Because I’m nearing my fiftieth anniversary, too, and I can’t quite match those two people: the little girl and the adult I’ve been for some time now.

           And so, each day brings imperceptible change, but change for certain. Occasionally, we pause, at a birthday, perhaps, or at New Year’s, and reflect and take stock. Have I changed? How have I changed? What changes will the coming year of life bring?  I wasn’t aware, back there in my dotted-Swiss dress, of any change at all in myself. I was shy and a little bit envious of my cousin in her yellow organza, also carrying presents. She seemed more worldly-wise than I, as much as one can be at six! Life has taken us divergent ways; she has stayed in her hometown, I have traveled the world and lived in four countries outside my own. Who could have imagined it? Certainly not I. Staying or leaving, both our lives have brought changes. It cannot be otherwise.         

           Do I welcome change? As a child, I didn’t. I dreaded each new year of school. I would have stayed home with my mother had I had the choice. Left to myself, I would have stunted my own growth, stifled change. Life has taken me, along with my shyness, into places, mental and emotional as well as physical, where I never would have gone on my own; has forced me, for want of a gentler word, into changes not of my choosing.

           There are critical points in our lives where we must choose between change and standing still. Not choosing is itself a choice.

           Why would I knowingly join an organization comprised of extroverted, leader-types--I who am an introvert, content to be a follower? It was because of that critical point. There was an easier, more comfortable choice, but the harder choice before me was compelling and drew me on, despite its challenges. Simply, I believed it was right. And that has made all the difference. Could I imagine how it would change me? Of course not.

           Paul Tournier, Swiss psychologist and physician, writes in his book, Learn to Grow Old, that change is to be welcomed for the very reason that it keeps us from becoming rigid and immovable. In other words,  positive change will help us, in thinking and living, to stay mentally younger and more resilient. I have learned to be thankful for my changes.

           Some changes, of course, can be abrupt and jolting, upsetting life and life’s rhythms with finality. My  first child going off to college in America while we were still living in Germany was one of those. She was  suddenly missing at her place at the table. Her room was empty—till her brother took it over, at least. She was far, far away, and she would not be coming home weekends. A family, devoid of one of its members, takes on a different dynamic. That change, in our family, was repeated several times over.

           When we left Germany to move to Hungary, a move dictated by our work in an altered political climate, I grieved. Mornings for almost a year, I woke up thinking, “We can’t go back to Germany. We can’t  go back--” I had brought three children into the world in Germany. We had lived there seventeen years and had to leave German friends behind. It was our home. I had been comfortable there. I liked our life.

           I did not recover my equilibrium well that first year in Hungary. Everything was different: environment, language, culture, our work. Trent began traveling more often, not just within the country where we were living, but to the various countries of Eastern Europe, all less than a decade from communist rule. Our children still at home were adjusting to a new school in a new country. We had to renovate the one house on the market that was affordable and in the right location. And that, without the benefit of home improvement stores, so ubiquitous in America. On my first walkthrough of the house, I wailed to my husband, “It has no redeeming features!” He had bought it without me, brave man. It was the only way  possible for us at the time.

           Certainly, my horizons were expanded. Wrestling with a new, daunting language undoubtedly was beneficial for the synapses in my brain, keeping them pliant, they tell me. Shopping for sinks and wall tiles, trying to put in a kitchen devoid of cupboards and appliances was high drama. New working relationships, though positive and helpful, were still new and more. I had to expand, along with my horizons.

            Along the way, I began to love that life, too. I was living in a capital city of Europe, a beautiful one with a lot to offer. My own home took on a certain charm, and we welcomed people into it from all over Eastern Europe. My children acclimated; their horizons also expanded. The people we worked with became dear friends. When Trent and I got on the train that would take us inexorably away from Hungary after living there sixteen years, we clung to each other and sobbed.

           Some adventurers seek change for change’s sake. Others seek change of necessity. Most of my changes, it seems, have come to me.

           And so I know: I am a different person for the gradual, imperceptible—and even abrupt—growth that my changes have brought me. I still prefer predictability and comfort. But perhaps a “comfortable life” is not to be sought for the comfort itself, if the comfort stifles growth.

           I’m in my study now. The blue in the little square of window above my desk is fathomless. I feel expansive, energetic because of that blue. Maybe there will be a cloud tomorrow. Maybe it will look the same. But never again just this.

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[i] The line is from Micheal O’Sidhail, “A Fragile City”

[ii] Attributed to Heraclitus

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Limitations

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           Mary Oliver writes a rather whimsical poem called “Mozart, For Example.” In it, she ponders the thought, “All the quick notes Mozart didn’t have time to use…”     

           She alludes to the fact that even the unsurpassed Mozart, who wrote over forty symphonies and numerous operas, was not blessed with infinite time or even infinite talent, whose life on earth, in fact, was neither infinite nor long. Not even Mozart, master of notes, could use them all. He died at age 35.

           Life has built-in limitations.

          We are told that none of us uses even a fraction of the capacity we are given, though Mozart seemed to use a lot of his. A friend has a way of saying, somewhat wistfully, “While Mozart was composing    symphonies, I was playing with mud pies.” Alas, that’s probably what I was doing.

           I was a painfully shy child, hiding behind my mother in group situations, never comfortable with the  social scene at school in twelve years. I was an introvert before I knew the word and was amply content with my two or three good friends. When my own children started going to school, I would get stomach aches every September as memories of my painful awkwardness came flooding back. I projected my feelings onto my children—needlessly, as it turns out.

          When I did finally grow up, I joined an organization full of extroverted, leader-types. I was neither. I wondered how I would survive. I envied the ease at which many of my colleagues seemed to conquer their  surroundings, meet new people, go after challenges with excitement and confidence. I fulfilled my responsibilities, but few knew what it cost me in effort and self-effacement. To this day, I don’t like making entrances into groups, even with lots of practice.

           Mozart, for all his talent, was limited by finances, by many moves because of the constant striving for  gainful employment, and finally, by his decline in health. To an admiring public, his great success and  prodigious output as a musician tend to mask his personal constraints.

           Once I could name them, by way of personality and role-preference tests, what I considered my limitations seemed daunting. The tests named them for me: I was a “slow processor.” I was not a “multi-tasker.” “Strategic thinking” was not my forte. I was a “designer” but not a “developer.” 

           These insights were eye-openers for me. They explained some of my challenges. No wonder, for instance, I lost every argument with my teenage daughter who was a lightning-quick processor. No wonder it was 11:00 am before I felt like I was actually starting the day, even though I’d been up for hours, doing things. No wonder I needed someone to help me find out how to get from point A to point Z when I was lost in clouds of mystifying details. No wonder I had drawers full of unfinished projects: quilt tops, watercolors,  poems, children’s baby books, photo albums.

            Learning to understand ourselves and what we feel are our limitations helps us to navigate life’s exigencies a little more wisely. I learned that I did not have to have an immediate, well-thought-out response to every teenage challenge; I could give myself time to think. I learned to meet the day, knowing young children and interruptions would be part of it; I began to practice being thankful for even a small task accomplished. I learned that my unfinished projects would still be there later, and I now have the fun of  picking up some of them where I left off.

           Very slowly, I learned to quit comparing my limitations to others’ abilities. A foolish thing to do in any case; they had their own limitations. And I was, in reality, contented to be me. I did not want an extrovert, activity-driven life, even though I could admire friends with those temperaments and rejoice in their accomplishments. I knew women who baked chocolate-chip cookies at midnight! I did not want that kind of drive.

           Our limitations can be gifts in disguise. The writer Flannery O’Connor, like Mozart, had a short life.  She was afflicted with lupus, a crippling disease with energy-draining treatments. She could work on her novels and stories only two hours a day, but she wrote prolifically in those two hours. In a letter to a friend  she said: “We are all rather blessed in our deprivations if we let ourselves be, I suppose.” She loved to be with people, but her disease and energy level required a restricted life. The compiler and editor of her letters writes: “Once she had accepted her destiny, she began to embrace it, and it is clear…that she knew she…  [was]… exactly where she belonged.” She died at age 44.

           If we accept them, our limitations can have an alternate side, a positive one, possibly even a blessing.

          While I still sometimes chafe at the things that seem to restrict me, I can also appreciate them as latitude for my personality and whatever gifts or abilities I have. I can be alone, for instance, and enjoy it. I can putter around with my projects and relish the process rather than feel the need to race to a finished  product. I can take hours to write a poem or make a birthday card for a friend or my husband and feel  great satisfaction in doing so, even when the laundry has to wait. I can work in my flower beds and sigh over their imperfection and what I haven’t gotten done this year but find solace in the thought that there’s next year. I cook from scratch instead of buying ready-made products because I love creating good meals on my own, chopping, kneading, rolling out dough, even when it takes longer.

           Limitations come in other forms, of course. We are limited by twenty-four hours every day. And of that twenty-four, we need to devote seven or eight of them to sleep. That is a limitation we can be thankful  for. When we lived in Germany, shops closed half days on Saturdays and Wednesdays and all day on  Sundays. I was thankful for those limitations. I had to think ahead. And it was with a sense of real freedom that I knew—I can’t go to the store, hurray! If I’d forgotten something, well, we could do without. Learning to do without can be instructive and even beneficial. Doing without helps us develop creativity as well as  forethought.

           We are thankful for certain limitations on our freedom. We are not free, for instance, to murder our enemy. We are not free to trample on someone who gets in our way. We are not free to rob the bank or steal our neighbor’s trash can. I am not free to go out at midnight and dig up the beautiful flowering bush I see down the street in someone’s yard and put it in my own.

           Jesus put further limitations on us besides the obvious ones. To hate my neighbor or my brother in my heart is the same, he said, as murder. To want another woman’s husband with lustful intent in my heart is tantamount to adultery. Those limitations put a check on my hateful thoughts and my jealous or lustful desires. I can be thankful for those limitations put on me and on others, as well. I want those limitations to be theirs, too.

           I have an elderly neighbor who is limited in her ability to walk. It is with struggle that she can push herself up out of her chair, hold on to her walker and come to the door when I knock. When I apologize for making her get up, she says, “Oh no! I need to get up!” She would love to be able to take walks, as I can, but  she is thankful that she can still come to her door, even when she can’t go beyond it. She is consistently cheerful, the mark of a contented person. She helps me look at my limitations in a different light.

           If I am not a Mozart, neither am I limited to making mud pies. If I am a slow processor, at least I can  process. If I am an introvert, I can be thankful for my love of quiet, a rarity in a noisy world. Because I am not a multi-tasker, I can enjoy processes that perhaps someone else would rush through, missing the patience it requires.

           If I am limited by time in this life—and each of us is in one way or another—I can learn to make the most of the time I’m given.

           It is, after all, the only time I can count on.