The space of change
A few weeks ago a photo from when my husband and I moved into our new house came up as a memory on Facebook. The picture reminded me of an exchange we had last year when this anniversary rolled around. My husband commented on how many changes we have made to the house in just a couple years. I responded with how much the house had changed us.
It is no accident that I came to live where I do in a too-large-for two-people-and-a-dog house on five acres with pasture fencing enclosing the landscaped portion and wildness extending beyond that to the property line. The universe was inviting me to grow, to push past the fences of my current environment that were keeping me confined to an old way of being.
What I realize now is that the space hasn’t changed me but rather it’s the space I needed to change. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was embarking on a major life transition. This wasn’t about external changes, though there were plenty of those, including leaving a job, getting married, and moving to a new state to name just a few. This was about a deep internal shift—a transition to a new state of being.
Here’s the thing: Transitions require space. In any transition there is a period of dismantling where you let go of who you were in order to become who you are meant to be. As William Bridges wrote in Transitions—Making Sense of Life’s Changes, “…the old habits and behaviors and practices that made you feel like yourself … have to be taken apart a piece at a time.”
That is exactly what moving to this place provided me—space to dismantle my old self bit by bit as well as figure out what I wanted for the me I was becoming. Transitions don’t always require changing locations. However, places as well as people and situations can keep us stuck in the old when we are meant to move toward the new.
I can see now that for me, for this transition, I needed new space. After my divorce, I had moved back to a place and people that I loved. But like a favorite pair of old shoes that were once familiar and comfortable, they no longer fit quite right. They had gotten a little small and a bit pinchy. I knew I couldn’t stay where I was, living a facsimile of a previous life, when my soul yearned for something more, something different, something bigger.
That’s what transitions do. They invite us to become bigger than the person we were before. And, you have a choice. You can choose to either accept or decline that invitation.
At many times during this transition, I have received numerous invitations to choose the bigger life. Just this summer, in fact. The invitation to show up for my husband as his mom was dying in a different way than I had when I went through this with my parents. The invitation to add a second dog to our family. The invitation to invest in our happiness by buying a trailer that would allow us to explore and connect with the nature that surrounds us even though my ego was yelling “Don’t spend the money!”
I accepted all those invitations.
My life now, for many who knew me when, may look very similar to my old life. The life I left when I got divorced. A house with land in the country, two dogs, and a travel trailer. There’s one critical difference. I chose these things. They weren’t decisions made for me in the interest of “us,” or decisions I made because I felt they were what someone else wanted or based on an outdated view of myself.
I made these decisions based on the person I am today and the vision I have for what a life I love looks like. I could only have made these decisions once I gave myself space to discover what I really wanted for myself.
Let me ask you this: If there is some place in your life where you feel the urge to grow, what would giving yourself space to explore what you want for yourself look like? How would it feel?
