Change Is Good
Things that do not change, do not grow. I would say that complacency has always been a fear of mine – yes, I have fears. For many years the fear of complacency actually overtook my life to the point of it being more of a fear of settlement (which there’s a healthy and fine balance between the two.) After the age of 18, I had a different address every year until the age of 25 due to my life jumping from one scenario to another – all of which I chocked up to the adventurous side of me. Around the age of 25, I was ready to settle – or so I thought. We purchased our first home and remodeled it for the first year and then I realized that the annual time had come to change locations again basing it off of my previous patterns. The annual time that things had always changed arrived the next year and I felt this burning need to move… I didn’t know how to sit still. Here I was with a beautiful home that I finally had my name on the note, not someone elses investment with a great life and yet I was ready to move on to the next thing just because I was afraid of becoming complacent. Change is good, but jumping… not so much. After I made myself settle – I came to realize that you can still fight off complacency without having to be so drastic. We can improve ourselves in education, our values, goals, family relations to ward off complacency… unlike my prior idea of change meaning change location, house, state, job, etc. Looking back, it wasn’t that I wanted all of those things in my life to change so constantly but it was more of a fear that if there wasn’t something changing in my life then that must have meant that I wasn’t growing. That’s not at all the case – in fact, sometimes you need to put down a good set of roots in a place in order to grow anything in the first place. Where we become robbed of our own future is when we get so settled that we don’t change anything about ourselves (goals, dreams, education) and we keep on living in our same little ways that we always have lived by. Life is so short and I believe that it’s meant to be lived. I don’t ever want to look back on my life and think to myself that I could’ve experienced so much more if I had only been willing to grow – to change. If you’ve been in a rut for quite some time now then start asking yourself the questions that will cause you to get out of your comfort zone.
What can I change?
How can I grow?
Do I know everything there is to know about what I’m passionate about?
What is it that I so enjoy doing?
How can I break up my normal routine this week?
How long has my routine been this way?
Do I need more of something?
Do I need less of something?
“What lies behind you and what lies in front of you pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
We all have areas in our lives that could use some improvement. Challenge yourself to grow, to change, to improve. Some of us may need more of something in our lives… some of us may need less and to simplify the clutter in our lives. As long as we aren’t complacent in our ways and we are striving for a better self then we are growing & growing is good. I’ll leave this one in the words of Babe Ruth, “It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.”