My husband and I have just finished visiting my parents in their new apartment. And I mean new: After almost 50 years in the same New York City apartment, they have moved to Connecticut, near New Haven, for various reasons: health, work, time to go.
They are happy, the new place is wonderful, and I was inordinately glad to see familiar objects, newly arranged, but still familiar. I was also way too gratified to see some of the same striking colors from the old place in the new one—the turquoise bedroom walls, for instance.
In other words, I needed to see that things had stayed the same; I needed a visceral experience of the tried and true, the familiar. OK, say it: I needed reassurance, some bulwark against change.
Against change! Despite the fact that the workshops I most love to give are all about transition, change, welcoming the new. Oy.
I must need to hear these exhortations about how great it is to move on, and how inevitable. In part because I am trying to wrestle with the Bible, where Jesus is always telling us to leave the nets, the parents, even; the old life, the old ways, and to follow him into a new way of being. He pitched an always moving tent. Abraham left home, unexpectedly, at an advanced age. Lot’s wife looked back at her old home, and that did not turn out too well for her.
We are encouraged, prodded in our pilgrimages, and that means sitting loose to any concept of home, which I assume can be both physical—where we live—and internal—how we see ourselves. Home is always shifting. I think I celebrate this, that I’m on the bandwagon, and then I realize how much I cling and need my signs that I can slow down the change.
Like many, I have a feeling I am called to do a dance of balance... to move into the new spaces and situations life demands, but not jettison the old to quickly. This integration may well start with perception. As the prophet Isaiah in the Old Testament reminds, God is in the business of saying:
“Behold, I am doing a new thing—do you not perceive it?”
As we move into the slower days of summer, take a look around, both outside and inside. Where is the new thing you are being asked to perceive... And what is the cost and promise of welcoming it?