wheel

A wise friend once said to me that people have an extraordinary ability to adapt their new realities. She made this comment while I was in France and I had to agree. There, my "new reality" sometimes felt like it was all I had ever known. Endless baguettes, goat cheese, and "Ca va?" eventually came to represent a kind of familiarity. Even a normality.

In spite of this fact, I tend to feel uneasy about change. I grasp at the sands of the present only to find them slipping through my fingers faster and faster. Every time I think I've adjusted to a new reality, an even newer one presents itself and I wonder if I can keep up with the pace. It's like I have to run to keep up with my own life. (For the record, I've never been very good at running. I was one of those kids who received a "Participation" ribbon at field days in elementary school.) And just as I settle into a routine, just as I'm beginning to adjust to my new reality... it's broken or disturbed by change.

That's not to say that there isn't an element of change that I love. I remember as I was waiting to board the plane to France, I kept thinking of how much I love airports. There is just something special about them. No matter what, it seems like something efficacious is happening: you're either embarking on a new adventure or kicking the traveler's dust off your shoes and returning home.

"Airports see it all the time, where someone's last goodbye blends in with someone's sigh because someone's coming home."

... and that's the way this wheel keeps working. We roll along in tandem with the ever-changing present and the result is an ever-changing self. We're constantly being refined by our experience. And if we let it, all these changes can create an extraordinary individual in us that we never knew could exist.

Yet I still wish my family didn't have to leave tomorrow. I was just getting used to having them here. I wish my dad could have come on this trip. I wish this weren't my senior year at BYU because I don't want to say goodbye to that reality, either.

And maybe it's my uneasiness about change that has led me to accruing outlandish fees because I just can't bring myself to turn in my RedBox rentals or my library books.