When Things Change

2019 was a challenging year for me. (In light of the new year, I know that this is a comical sentiment, but bear with me.) I felt unsettled for most of it and I could never quite put my finger on why. So many of my friends who moved away from Nashville after college were moving back. The people around me kept seeming to multiply. It was an absolute and constant whirlwind of happy hours and new faces and adventures and all of the blazing, wild fun and early morning regrets that come with it. I was having the best time but couldn’t shake the discontent I was feeling deep down for seemingly no real reason.

It occurred to me at some point, though, that for so long my community was much smaller. For so long my community consisted mostly of me and two of my best friends gathering every week at Cinco de Mayo West Nashville to discuss flaky boys and frustrating jobs and all of our pressing questions about God over pitchers of margaritas. While those days were lonelier and quieter than my days felt last year, I spent a good part of 2019 aching for them in their absence. 

And the thing is, I love being around people. I love that so many of my friends finally wised up and returned to my city. There is a genuine joy that pops up in me when I am in the presence of loud rooms and shared experiences. But for the three years since I graduated college, my life was fairly predictable. My jobs and dreams changed a little bit, but for the most part I knew what to expect. Have these friends, go to these places, meet these kinds of boys. Lather, rinse, repeat. It was a very controlled environment. When things started to shift out of this environment, the thing my heart longed for was not less connection, it was less change. I was so used to the comfort of the way things were for so long, anything that posed a threat to this comfort was unsettling. It taught me quickly that loss of the old and excitement for the new are not mutually exclusive. Just because something changing is a hard thing doesn’t mean that it is not a good thing.

There’s a lot of talk about change lately, isn’t there? It is, in fact, the only thing that we seem to talk about these days. Not just the temporary, daily, locked-in-our-houses-for-the-time-being kind of change, but big change. We are learning the ways in which our patterns as human beings in our culture, however comforted we may be by them, have been harming our neighbors and the world around us. We are seeing a clearer divide between the rich and poor. We are being confronted by the reality that our hurried, competitive, no-time-for-rest culture has taken a toll on our souls and mental health, only because we have finally been given permission to take a step back from it. Our economy is shifting in a scary way; our sense of security has been shaken; we have no idea how long it will take us to heal. Everything is changing—some of it is good, some of it is bad, and all of it is hard. 

There is an instant fear that comes up in me whenever I see something posted online or someone talks in conversation about how we won’t be returning to Life As We Knew It. The thing that has secretly comforted me the last six weeks of being locked in my apartment is this disillusioned idea that at some point someone will stand up and make the announcement that quarantine is over, COVID-19 has decided to take a forever sabbatical on some deserted island, and we can all go about business as usual. We won’t have to ease our way back into it. I will return to work, mask-less and generating the same amount of income I typically would during the warmer months. We will all enjoy happy hours and pool days and the months of isolation will be completely erased from our memories. Hallelujah and amen.

“I just want to go back to the way things were” is a thought that crosses my mind approximately one thousand times per day. I don’t want to move forward—moving forward is too uncertain and risky right now—I want to go back. I would like to return to the hustled, individualistic, safe (for me) way it was, thank you very much. This thought process reminds me of a story in Exodus—the story of the Israelites fleeing captivity in Egypt and making their way to the promised land. The tale goes that the Israelites spent forty years in the wilderness between the time they fled and the time they received their promise, and they were pissed. Spending a couple months locked in my apartment with Netflix, a comfortable bed, and good company has resulted in me throwing a few dozen tantrums, so let me make it clear that I don’t blame them. They were scared and they wanted to go back to Egypt. They had just been ripped away from the only life they knew and, even though that life was terrible and inhumane, it was predictable. Continuing on the road to the promised land was much more uncertain. The change they were experiencing was good but it was really, really hard. 

I think we are experiencing something similar. While I don’t on any level believe that God executed a global pandemic to get us to open our eyes and change, I do believe that we, like the Israelites, are facing every temptation to make Life Moving Forward look like Like As We Knew It. And I know the point is not to go back, the point is to move forward with a new perspective. The point is to be better for our time in the wilderness.

What does it look like to handle change gracefully? I have been asking myself this question a lot lately. Change, by definition, means leaving behind one thing and moving forward into something new. It means loss. And part of what it looks like to handle change gracefully is mourning loss. We have all lost something during this time, whether it feels like a big loss or a small loss, It is good and necessary to pay your respects to whatever it is.

It also looks like giving ourselves a lot of grace. When I started writing this post, I was going to make the point that an inability to adapt well to a shifting environment is just us trying to feign some sort of control in our lives. While I do believe there is truth in this thought, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for grace.

It seems like everyday I subscribe to a different quarantine mindset. Some days I get a lot done and my bed is made and I run three miles. Some days I lay in bed and watch Netflix. Some days I feel everything all at once and some days I feel completely illiterate when it comes to what’s going on inside of me. Almost always I am tempted to believe that the way I am handling change at any given moment is the wrong way. I am feeling too much; I’m not feeling enough. I am using my time frivolously; I am not using my time to rest. The reality is, it is all me handling change the best way I know how day by day. You, too, are handling change the best way you know how, and it is not helpful for us to add “self-condemnation” to our to-do lists. What would it look like to practice leaning into grace, instead?

I honestly don’t have any answers on how to move forward with wisdom and intentionality as the world attempts to return to some semblance of normal, all I know is that we have never done anything like this before. I think it is a real opportunity to lean into the discomfort of change—both on a personal and communal level. The more I avoid thinking about how things will inevitably change, the more space I give myself to consider the things I would like to be different when everything is said and done. I would like to get more sleep and spend more time at the park. I would like to cultivate more genuine and honest conversations and relationships. I would like to make more of an effort to step outside of my privilege and work to understand how to help meet the needs of my neighbors on the other side of a pandemic. It is not my intention to minimize the absolute havoc that coronavirus has wreaked, but I do think that we have the chance to look back one day and realize that we took the shitty hand we’ve been dealt in this season and were better for it. Change is always hard but maybe, just maybe, we can use this change as a gateway into something good.