The Inevitable Has Arrived

Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and  eventual extinction.--Jean Debuffet

While my home situation remains in limbo, my work situation is about to change.  The big move is finally on. When I walk out of these doors on Friday at 4:30, I won't be walking back through them again.  Granted, five years is not an enormous amount of time in one's life,  but it doesn't make it any easier to face this transition into a new place....especially when that place is so much smaller than the one you are currently in...when you find out that you will no longer be sharing an office with one person;  instead, you'll be sharing a cubicle with four other people...and you will be sitting right out in the open, right in the middle of the floor.  

There will be no such thing as boundaries, no opportunity to make your space comfy and homelike because clients will have total access to the area.  They will walk out of group,  and there you are.  Yikes!!!  And I complained about boundary issues now?  Not good.  So, now that the move is right around the corner, I have been feeling a bit overwhelmed about the choices I have to make; that is, what will go with me and what will I have to leave behind.  Problem is, everything I have accumulated in these years...and then some since some of the items came with me from my other job...has some meaning to me, little trinkets from clients, gifts from co-workers, a gorgeous little desk clock from hubby, a candy dish from a co-worker when I left my last job, my singing animals, a colorful poster of the Kaballah on my wall.  Not easy choices to make. 

Coping with change isn't easy, but would life be pretty stagnant and boring without it? Many people resist change, and I am guilty on occasion, finding it far more comfortable to drift along day after day in the same old routines, but change is a constant; everyone faces it at some point in their lives, and we often feel overwhelmed by it.  We have two choices when dealing with change. We can fight and resist — or we can surrender and embrace.  We can resolve to make the best of it, or fight it every step of the way...and make ourselves miserable.  It's all up to us.  We can embrace the new, or we can struggle and suffer.   

I've been through far more drastic changes than this in my life, and I have survived.  No sense in lying to myself.  Yes, I WILL miss it here and I probably WILL be quite uncomfortable as I try to adjust.  But,  I will always have my memories of this place, and nothing can take those memories away. They will follow me always, both the good times and the bad, and, as one of the last of the old historical neighborhoods continues to change and modernize, I will move on and I can always say I worked here when it still was a very special place.

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.--Anatole France