How Do We Face Major Life Changes : Delights of the Ordinary No. 52 (S2)
It’s strange to feel change coming.
Delights of the Ordinary is for us who are trapped in the world of hustle culture but are quiet at heart with an itching creative bone. This newsletter intersects culture, art, science, and philosophy with our practical 9-5 job space.
When you meet someone after many light years, you instinctively take a split nano pause; search the person in your memory to readjust their face from where you left them.
- Anugrah
It has taken me a good few years to get comfortable showing my writing online and in some way step out with my art boldly.
When I fancifully and secretly wrote, it was like a child who got a chance to talk after a long haul of silence. She would write anything and everything without any intelligent statements or thoughtful stretches, speaking like gibberish. I guess my writing was like senselessly pelting stones here and there.
However, later when I joined the school to learn creative writing, I learned about editing and how well you can un-jumble your jumbled thoughts on paper. I was still a full-time nutritionist back then.
Then once, I quietly wrote on my Facebook wall, one story. Then some more. And then some poems. Facebook was not much of a marketing machine back then. Friends whom you knew in real life were friends on Facebook too. Most of them took to cheer me up and went on to read all that I wrote.
I guess friends are such awesome species that it doesn’t matter how far you are from each other, if you find them at any life bend, you start reliving the same childhood again.
Thus, when some of you give me hushed or chirpy coaxing not to stop writing or letting me know that my letters are awaited each week, it puts me in a space of some form of delightful bliss, that writing is still appreciated, even when you are talking about the most ordinary stuff. The extra-hyper-fluffs of our lofty-paced life cannot put a blanket over the light that shines through the delights of the ordinary things of life.
And hence, you may be a techie, an accountant, a manager, or a believer in simple things in life, you are welcome to this unhurried way. If we could have our way none of us would thrust things on ourselves that we do not enjoy. Yet, this never remains an option as soon as you get married, have children to nurture, deal demanding jobs and bosses, growing old, and sooner or later hair turning grey - a lot of it changes. Mandates change, our body changes so much so that days feel longer and life shorter!
It’s strange to feel change coming. It’s easy to ignore. An underlying restlessness seems to accompany it like birds flocking before a storm. We go about our business with the usual alacrity, while in the pit of our stomach there is a sense of something tenuous.
- Terry Tempest Williams
What is change?
Octavia Butler once wrote,
“All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
is Change.
God
is Change.”
When our life situations, our loved ones in these situations, our relationships or our workspaces and colleagues in them are altered, modified, removed or replaced we experience change and we change along with this topographical terrain of life.
Changing schools, cities, going to universities, new jobs, marriage, birth of your child, death of a loved one, changing jobs, and new bosses are major life changes and can spin unwelcomed stress in our lives, challenging our self-identities.
(self-Identities are how we recognise ourselves in our lives. A mother, father, or a manager? What role are you living in your head and that role occupies a major chunk of your life.)
Identity Paralysis
According to Harvard Business Review, for most individuals changing circumstances can stigmatize our identities. This is known as “Identity Paralysis.” They studied hundreds of people for a decade and found that “regardless of whether the changes were ostensibly positive or negative, many of the people… struggled to move on from their past identities and embrace their new selves. This feeling of stuck-ness — a phenomenon we call identity paralysis — often left people feeling angry, frustrated, and hopeless about their current situations.”
In our short life, our relationship with change is rather complicated. Because in the marrows of our souls, we desire some kind of permanency. While on the shore lies change, which is the liminal space of the unexplored while as living, moving, feeling created species, we like holding the belief of who we are as a permanent-selfhood.
How Should We Cope With It?
Thence, the question is how should we cope with change or do we even need to cope with the changing verve of life?
Since most of the changes in our lives are undesirable and out of our control, they become deeply uncomfortable and excruciatingly aching - be it business, or life. Because, we get accustomed and habituated to the slower sluggish changes without even detecting them while hurried changes are a heck-of-an-episode to deal with.
Thus, on a closer look, the prudency is in this, that we don’t always have to hysterically struggle and jostle in our lives to be meaningful.
Harvard Business Review says, "It’s easy to feel like your job is your whole identity — especially when you just lost a great one or when it feels like it’s the only thing anyone sees when they look at you. But research has shown that it’s very possible to have multiple, coexisting identities at the same time. As such, if you’re uncomfortable with your current identity at work, focusing on other aspects of your identity can be an effective strategy to help you get through a difficult transition.”
In a lot of what life holds are many changes, resembling tiny twinkling stars to massive bulldozing meteorites and we have to learn to become easy with the uncomfortable changes. As actor Jeff Bridges puts it, “The habitual tendency when things get tough is that we protect ourselves, we get hard, we get rigid. But...that’s the time to soften and see how we might play or dance with the situation.”
So in all these sunbeams that change in time and shadows that shift with each passing minute, we all have to expect that everything isn’t too foolproof and every generation, every era will change eventually, and every season- though same- will always be different in its nuanced details.
When on Monday we all start running the race again, may we not forget the flavour of the rest we can have amidst changes. The ordinary shelves of our rooms may carry a lot of our stories in it and ordinary people, friends, and family can become the leaning brick wall for us when tides become simply devastating.
“What have we to go on? What to cling to? That people may change, that one person can help another. That’s all. Maybe that’s enough.”
- Allen Wheelis
To end: To this month that will change into autumn soon.
August By Mary Oliver
When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the brambles
nobody owns, I spend
all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking
of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body
accepts what it is. In the dark
creeks that run by there is
this thick paw of my life darting among
the black bells, the leaves; there is
this happy tongue.
Have a pleasant week!
- Anugrah
Note: To you who have been my diligent reader, I am highly grateful for the time and room that you give me in your heart. For in some way or another letting me know that you are echoing along. If you know even one person who will benefit from reading Delights of the Ordinary then feel free to share it with them.
Who am I?
Hi, I am Anugrah. I write Delights of the Ordinary for us who are trapped in the world of hustle culture but are quiet at heart with an itching creative bone and love for life. My newsletter intersects culture, art, and inner health in our practical 9-5 job space. Feel free to share.
Delights of the Ordinary currently is a free publication. Yet it takes me many hours of effort to write and curate it. I may need lots of coffee to keep me going. You can :)
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Much love :)