In modern life, most of us move at least once, if not several times during the course of our lives. In previous generations it was more common to stay in the place we grew up and retire at the same company we started with. Current studies show that the average time at a job in modern society is around 5 years. Often job changes mean moving. Learning to handle moving with grace can be a tremendous benefit to your happiness and your family’s well-being.
Time to Shift
During college, I spent some time living in Kenya. I lived in a small slum outside of Nairobi and traveled each day by matatu (old VW buses repurposed as public transport for 15 people) to a rural school. We spent our days teaching children hygiene. They used frayed branches as toothbrushes and had to wipe themselves with their hands after using the toilet if they didn’t bring their own toilet paper. I’ll never forget the day I asked the children, “Where to germs come from?” They said, “Satan!” My eyes got big, and I realized we had some basics to cover! One of my favorite days was teaching the children how to dance the Virginia reel and kicking up red dirt as we twirled and laughed through it. Their natural exuberance was contagious as was their curiosity.
Part way through my time there, there were some government misunderstandings, and skepticism about our work. We were told we had to “shift.” I had never heard of this before. Our neighbors explained it meant, we had to move. We had to stop working, and change apartments. I was heartbroken—I had come to love the children and I felt I had made some in-roads with teaching. Regardless, it was time to “shift.”
As I have moved many times since then—I have come to love the idea of “shifting.” When we move, we literally do more than simply transport ourselves and our possessions from one place to another. We change. Just as a shift key on the keyboard changes a letter from lower-case to upper case, moving allows us to change who we are—to up level ourselves to something even better.
Change Will Be a Constant
We can all expect change. We will have to move, people pass away, our health deteriorates, we lose jobs. Even changes we want and choose can be hard; when we graduate from college and enter the work force, when we get married, when we have a baby, when we leave the work force, when our last child enters kindergarten, when we retire and the list goes on. Change is a constant.
Don’t Resist
I find I often resist change because it is an ending—it means losing something I had, was, or wanted to be. Even if it’s something I don’t like, knowing something is at the end brings with it some mourning. Part of letting something go, is acknowledging how much something or someone meant to you. It’s recognizing how it’s been part of your life and imagining what life will be without it.
When we resist the emotions of disappointment, discouragement and sadness, they turn into resentment and anger. It’s such a tremendous relief to accept a sadness. Resistance requires a lot of mental and emotional space. Letting it go, frees our brains and hearts to be open to how to adapt to the change and how to solve the problem.
Make Space for the Old
One way to give voice to our loss and sadness is to create rituals. Rituals can help us acknowledge endings. Our family has a little ritual at the end of each of our international postings. Each child gets to list a few places that are most important to them—a favorite restaurant, school, church, a beach, a park etc. We take a family drive and video all of our favorite and frequented places that have become part of our daily pattern in a place. We enjoy talking about them as we drive and it’s a way of saying good-bye. We try to do the same with people we love—plan a chance to say good-bye and acknowledge their presence in our lives.
Another way acknowledge pieces of our old lives in an on-going way is to hold “country nights.” We include a holiday for each country we’ve lived in on our family calendar. We celebrate our time in a particular place on the holiday for that country—we wear traditional clothing, eat local foods from that place and watch pictures from our time there. Recently we celebrated “May Day” or “Lei Day” for Hawaii. We wore leis, ate Dole Whip and watched pictures from our time there. It helps us continually bridge back to the past and commemorate our significant connections.
Don’t Indulge Sticky Sweetness
Grief is a clean emotion—it’s cathartic and healing. Self-pity is an indulgent emotion. There isn’t much positive that comes from it. There is a fine line between mourning and becoming a victim. I love the way CS Lewis describes this tricky space. In “A Grief Observed,” a book he wrote after his wife died he says, “I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it–that disgusts me.” We need the catharsis of processing our emotions and acknowledging them. However, once that has been accomplished, continuing to “indulge” in the “sticky-sweet pleasure” of our self-pity becomes harmful. It is when we cross this line that it’s time to channel our inner Elsa and “Let it go.”
I find the time I most want to indulge in the sticky-sweet pleasure of self-pity is a few week to a few months after we move. It’s takes tremendous energy to start fresh somewhere, particularly when it is in an unfamiliar place, culture and in an unknown language. Making friends takes time. At first everything is new and fresh, and then the newness wears off and the difficulty sets in. It’s when everything seems “hard” in our new home that my brain wants to whine and indulge in what we’ve left behind. It’s beyond the feeling of loss of our last home—it’s all the drama my brain is offering me about creating the new life and how hard it is. This is when it’s time to let go. Staying in the self-pity keeps us spinning our wheels. We just dig deep ruts instead of moving forward.
Create a Vision
One of the things I find has helped me keep from spinning my wheels, is to create a vision of what I want our life to look like in our new place. I try to fill the void of the old with something new. One of our favorite things to do is to make a bucket list for each place we live—places we want to go and things we want to do while we live there. Often we even map out trips to nearby locations and when we will take them.
I love working out the details of the flow of our new home…who will share a room, which door will we come into, what will each child’s chores and family contributions will be. I love to research opportunities for our family to contribute in our new community. I feel like it’s easier to start new family patterns in a new place. There aren’t the old patterns in place. Everyone is shifting mindsets and starting new family plans pairs well with a move.
I love to dream big—I love to think about who I want to be in our new place. Some of the thoughts I have had include “I want to be an on-time person in this new place.” “I want to be more balanced with self-care in my new home.” “I want to be deliberate with spending.” Shifting is a bonus new beginning.
It’s hard to create amazing things without have dreamt them up first. Knowing what we are going helps us leave things behind more easily. It also gives us a template and momentum to begin creating a new life.
Creating
Even if we have mourned and visualized a new future, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with moving. It’s a lot of work logistically and emotionally to start over. Just the boxes and re-organization alone are overwhelming, not to mention meeting new friends, finding new places of worship, and stores to obtain what we need. Often when we feel overwhelmed our natural inclination is to consume. We eat more, we watch more Netflix, we indulge in anger or irritation. We look at others and expect them to reach out to us—we want to consume their friendship. These things cause us to feel a temporary relief, but don’t address what we really crave which is happiness in our new life. When we feel the urge to consume, we can create instead. We can begin creating organization in our home, we can begin reaching out to others to invite them over to create new relationships, we can begin creating the person we want to be in our new home. It is creating that will fulfill our deepest cravings for peace.
Edit Your Brain
Often our biggest enemies and intruders in creation are our own thoughts. It’s common to say things to ourselves that we would never tell someone else. “This will never work.” “It will never be as good.” “What was I thinking?” “Why did we do this?” “I’ll never make friends as good as I had before.” “I hate it here.” Ironically, these thoughts sabotage our ability to make our move a good experience.
Changing our thoughts can provide the momentum to create the new life we want. We can replace negative thoughts, with thoughts like “I got this.” “I don’t know how this will all work out, but I know it will.” “I have faith.” “I’m excited to see how this all works out.” “Hard is good.” These types of thoughts give me so much more confidence and energy to do the work of creating something new. Sometimes that sticky sweetness of self-pity seems so tempting, but being willing to set it aside and to do something new is so much sweeter.
Shifting Into Action
It means introducing myself over and over again our first few months. I try not to wait for others to reach out to me, I take the responsibility of seeking people out and getting to know them. We have people over to dinner. We invite friends over for playdates. I plan the first few times I go anywhere that I will probably get lost and it will take a long time to figure out the navigation, parking etc. It usually DOES take a long time, but I expected it so I’m not frustrated. On particularly difficult days, I try to find humor in our situation and tell the events in the most dramatic way possible at family dinner or to a friend. Laughing about it is almost like an escape valve that lets of the pressure. There are always setbacks. I try to plan on them—lots of them! But the more I get out and begin creating the positive momentum the more courage I gain to keep creating.
The process of change is messy and frustrating. The process of mourning, letting go and creating new is not a neat step ladder process–it’s all mixed up at times. Sometimes I experience all of them in the same day or the same hour! No matter where I find myself in the process, when I view it all in the context of shifting to something new, something better it gives me hope and courage to keep trying.
Shift with Grace
What is a change in your life right now?
1. Think of change as a chance to up-level yourself like the shift key on the keyboard.
2. Envision the new, but make space for the old (rituals).
3. Don’t get stuck in the sticky sweetness of self-pity.
4. Start creating.