Lifestyle settles in to stay. Stone by stone the definition of who you are and what you do stacks up and eventually becomes a solid wall of defining characteristics. And so it was with me January of this year. Where I lived, what I did, who I was, all neatly determined and known to all who know me. Married for far more years than I was ever single, working for the same employer for nearly 30 years, living in the same home for 18 years and the same community for the entirety of my adult life; mother, sister, daughter, friend, coworker, sometime community volunteer, neighbor. All was in place and known; the poster child for predictability.
Day follows day, get up, do the things that you do, see the people you see, end day, repeat. It is not a depressing thing, or even a conscious thing, it just is. After years of consistency, it had become easier to be comfortable in my own skin, to carry with me a certain amount of confidence and yes, competence. But the only thing certain in life, beyond death and taxes, is change. Perhaps dramatic change does not occur in a single lifetime--no major wars, economic depressions, or population clearing plague to disrupt the sands beneath the feet--but changes are a certainty, be they subtle or overwhelming.
And so it was, with more than a quarter century of having all those things that defined me in place, that I knew exactly who I was. All the while little insidious changes were working, creating a little shift in the wall like a distant rattle. The question was, do I hear the little earthquake and pick up the rattle and shake it, or turn away from the sound and continue on as if the wall stood in stoney silence.
Shake it up baby!
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