Change Is Opportunity

Barbara Z. Perman, Ph.D.

 "We will open the book.  Its pages are blank.  We are going to put words on them ourselves.  The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day."  ~ Edith Lovejoy Pierce

Well, it's January. A new year has begun. It has got me thinking about what "newness" means to us. We have a new baby in our family. My nephew's second son represents hope and possibility and a glimpse into the future. He also represents change. Change for his three year old brother who will no longer be the only center of attention. Change for my nephew who said to me, "It feels really different with two children. Before we were a couple with a child, now we are a family". For sure anything new brings that feeling of change. While it brings with it lots of possibilities, it can also bring emotions like uncertainty, fear, and worry.

People move through change in different ways. Some find it more difficult than others. Some changes are clearly more difficult than others. Even changes that we are looking forward to can still cause anxiety. Often I think about how change has changed. When I was growing up in the 50's, change was slow. When something happened that was different, there was generally time to absorb the change and to settle down with the new circumstances. There was so to speak "recovery time". It was like a wave that came to shore on a balmy day where you could jump over it or let it splash you and you had time to catch your breath easily before the next wave came. But over the ensuing decades, change sped up. There was barely time to recover before a new change was upon us. It was more like one wave coming in after another with no time in between to rest.

Today, change is happening so fast that we don't even have time to think about recovery from it before the next one is hitting us. Changes actually overlap. To put it another way, we live in perpetual whitewater. This is hard to take and we aren't even conscious of the consequences. For wherever there is change there is loss. Are you adjusted to your remote on your DVD player or the one on your new box that comes with HDTV? Adjusting to a new remote seems like a small thing in the scheme of things, but it is a little aggravation every time you sit down thinking you are going to relax. Many of us are saying to ourselves "I finally mastered the old one and "they" have taken it away." This sense of loss builds up - from the "little things" like the remote to big things - like losing a childhood friend. We are living in a state of chronic loss and grief and we don't even realize it. What can we do about it?

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross taught us that when we experience loss, there are stages of grief we need to pass through in order to find ourselves again. Denial, bargaining, ..........acceptance are the five classic ones. The time frame for passing through these stages varies and it can be like a spiral staircase where you think you are done with a stage only to find yourself there again when something triggers the feelings again.

Ultimately, we need to come to terms with loss. It is hard to do. There will always be things that bring up what has been lost even if we are the sort that embraces the future. It helps if we can use a technique called reframing to help ourselves. When you reframe something, you shift the way you see it without actually changing the facts of it and it changes the meaning of it for you. You make up your mind to look at it in a different way and it changes everything! Change can thus be viewed as an opportunity to see things differently.

I had this happen for me thirteen years ago when my mother decided to move out of the home she had been in for 48 years. I had always known that it would fall to me to do this task and I dreaded it. Part of it was the anticipation of potentially unhappy circumstances being the impetus to tackle it, but part of it was the sheer weight (emotionally and physically) that such a project carried with it. When the announcement came that mom wanted to move I made up my mind to see it as an opportunity rather than a dreaded event. We went through the house bit by bit. We laughed and we cried and she told stories old and new and it turned into a heartrending, rewarding, and priceless experience. Not only that, but a new direction came out of it for me. It was the beginning of a new business - the professional move management business - a business where I others to downsize and move, especially seniors. All of us have these kinds of stories where we faced a change that brought the closing of one door and then we discovered that another opened up.

We are all seeking stability and balance as we move through so much change. We are finding it through exercise, meditation, time with family and friends, pursuing hobbies, and/or creating a Sabbath for ourselves where we slow down and get off the treadmill. In the midst of downsizing our home of 48 years with my Mother she told me a story about my Grandmother. She said that my Grandmother went to synagogue and every week would fall asleep during the service. When my Mother asked her about it my Grandmother said: "This is the only place I can come and fall asleep and when I wake up everything will be the same". We need these anchors in our lives - some things that are predictable and steady while life hurries us on.

As you set into motion whatever new year's resolutions you have made for yourself may you find reframing a useful tool and may you find some practices that support you and ground you as you move through this new year and this new chapter in our country's history. 

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Barbara Z. Perman, Ph.D. is President of Moving Mentor, Inc., a company that helps people move through change in productive and rewarding ways. Visit www.movingmentor.com for more information.