Gain a new perspective on how to be more welcoming to "change" in our life.
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Welcome to the Be Your Best Self Blog by Marsha Abbott. "It's Not the Enemy."
The other day I decided I needed a little “pick me up,” so of course I head straight to Starbucks. My 14-year-old son and his friend decided to tag along with me. As we were standing in line, those two are acting pretty typical…wrestling with each other, goofing around, and most importantly, laughing with huge smiles on their faces. Of course, I don’t know the secret language of 14-year-olds, so I wasn’t really sure what was so funny. They could have even been laughing at me for all that I knew, but I couldn’t stop myself from smiling anyway. And my reason for smiling was so much different than their reason. I couldn’t help smiling as I thought about these boys and their friendship. It’s a friendship that started a little differently than most but has taught me a huge life lesson along the way.
About two years ago, our family decided to move 30 miles north of the home town we all grew up in. It seems like such a small distance, but for our children it was a huge adjustment in their life. It meant changing schools. It meant meeting new friends. It meant uprooting their life as they once knew it.
The year we moved was the same year my son was starting 7th grade. As he waited for the bus to come pick him up on his first day of school, I sensed the nerves and anxiousness that most likely comes from starting a brand-new school in a brand-new town. I can only imagine the questions running through his mind: Will I make any friends? Would I do well with this larger school? Can I be happy here? Would it have been better if we decided not to move?
All of these emotions my son was feeling were pretty normal with the situation he had been given. These feelings and questions come to all of us naturally when we are experiencing one important thing in our life…change.
And the word “change” is such a loaded word. It can mean so many things to so many people, but typically what I see is that as humans we have a tendency to resist change. Our lives get on one path, one route, and we rarely want to veer from that. So why is this? Why do we all resist change so much? Why do we want things to always remain the same?
It’s because of this one simple fact: Change.Is.Hard. Change is so incredibly hard and let’s not forget how scary it can be too.
And sometimes, we are fortunate enough to get to make the choice on whether we want to change. Sometimes life grabs ahold of the wheel and takes us on a different path that we didn’t even welcome in our life. It forces us to change even when we don’t want to.
Either way, what change is really doing is making us face the unknown. It’s like walking into a dark cave without a clue as to what lies ahead. It means having to put trust in our decisions to walk into this uncertainty, and all while trying to keep the faith of where it might lead.
How many of you struggle with change? How many of you have been thinking about making some changes in your life but are too scared to move forward? How many of you are moving about in life on one path and don’t have the courage to veer from that course? How many of you, like my son, got forced into a change, and now you feel like your life is crumbling around you?
Whatever your story may be, there is one thing we all need to be reminded of. There is one thing we all need to take a step back and realize…change is not the enemy. And change doesn’t always have to feel so scary. In fact, I think we all need to start thinking about how scary life would be without us making changes. Because when change comes into our life, we get the chance to learn. We start to grow as human beings. And it pushes us to do things we would not normally do, which in turn, helps us to learn more about ourselves. With every change comes new experiences. And with every challenge comes new opportunities.
So for my son, our move required him to be courageous. To push himself when normally he would not want to. Being an introvert, he had to learn how to be more outgoing, and he had to learn how to make new friends. It’s why this change made him nervous, anxious, and worried. But what my son didn’t know at the time, on that first day of 7th grade, was how the rest of this story would play out…
As my son hopped off the bus and went into his first class that day, another young man recognized him from the ride to school. This young man knew many people in that class, but he saw my son sitting by himself. Something compelled him to go up and talk to him. They found out that they lived pretty close to each other and that they had a lot in common. And that was all it took. From that day forward, these two became the best of friends and almost inseparable.
I am a firm believer that the courage to change will lead you down a path you were meant to take. It’s hard for me to believe that these two young men may never have crossed paths. We were meant to make this change. It’s time to pause and look at your own life, and figure out what changes you, too, are meant to take. What path out there is waiting for you to have the courage to venture down? Only you can know that answer. And now might finally be that time.
So as we stood in the Starbucks line that day, and as I saw them laughing with each other, all I could do was smile. An outsider looking in would never guess that the boys only met two years ago. Because while my son “technically” only has two sisters, I can assure you on that first day of 7th grade, he met his “brother.” A friendship like that only comes around once in a lifetime. So yes, change may be hard and scary, but it’s notthe enemy. Because when we have the courage to finally make a change, we may just find out in the end, that it was so incredibly worth it.
*For those of you struggling with something in life or have a topic of interest that you want me to talk about in this blog, email me at BeYourBestSelfBlog@gmail.com. Let’s keep working together to Be Our Very Best Selves!