During the three-hour church sermons my family attended each week, I did word searches, simple crosswords and connect-the-dots puzzles. As a first-grader I was more patient than the average child, but hellfire-and-brimstone lectures could only captivate me so long before I retreated to the puzzle books I smuggled in with my Bible.
Connect-the-dots were the most effortless; anyone who could count to 30 could solve the puzzle in half as many seconds. For my own pleasure, I'd try to figure out the image before drawing the lines. The pictures were always politically-neutral and pleasant: sunflowers, swing sets, rainbows. Now I wonder what a connect-the-dot war scene would look like: numberless dots set apart from the rest of the picture - the bullets.
Despite individual perspectives on change, whether it's wanted or repelled, we each have a comfort zone - a familiar environment where we can reliably predict results and outcomes to our satisfaction. Comfort zones are so highly valued because they contain everything we want and nothing we don't; we censor the world around us to maintain our sanity and that which does not distress us becomes a part of us. Comfort is a sugar-coated word for control. Many days, we understand leaving our comfort zones as a right, a choice, a privilege - as an exercise in character.
As 2009 yielded to 2010, I obsessed about change and how and when it happens. People so often 'need a change,' a need quenched by a new hairstyle or a new address. These changes happen because we want them to happen, because we decided they will happen. These are controlled changes, which doesn't discredit them, but serves as a qualifier. When life feels static, fixed and flat, like that Indiana landscape we love to hate, we open the door of our zone and step out. Even if we don't enjoy the consequences, at least we had a choice in the matter.
Uncontrolled change is the not-quite-housebroken puppy. Sometimes he relieves himself on the newspaper in the corner and other times on the living room rug. When the latter happens, do we scream frustrations, clean it up or ignore it - too apprehensive of the stain it will leave?
More often, we experience all the phases of change: denial, frustration and acceptance.
Throughout Winter Break, when I miscalculated the effects of an extra cup of coffee or the bed was too cold for me to sleep, I read.
For about a week, the object of my reading was Joan Didion's 'The Year of Magical Thinking.' The memoir is Didion's response to the death of her husband, John Dunne, and an account of the grief she experiences throughout the following year. Referring to the moment John dies, she writes, 'Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.' Didion expected John to come home, to shower, to get dressed in the clothes she couldn't fathom throwing away. How could a change so life-altering happen right before dinner? Anyone who has experienced such an intimate loss would wonder similar questions.
Change separates the past from the present, from what was to what is. Our ability to remember how life used to be affects how we are able to live presently and the frustration at recognizing a happier former time can wear us thin. Didion later writes, 'I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.' We have to connect the dots and accept reality, even if we don't like drawing the lines.
Change can be crude and invasive. Just ask New York City or New Orleans or Haiti. Change is objective and emotionless. It happens. We want to know what the picture will look like before we pick up the pencil. Not connecting the dots and not believing the picture - refusing to see the bullets - is a life worse than reality; it's a fictitious one. Uncontrolled change creates a tension, a friction we work to resolve, and somewhere in that resolve, we ourselves can be changed, although 'for better or worse' is too conclusive, too simple of terms to consider some kinds of change. Change can just mean different and different is anything we aren't right now.
Write to JD at jdmitchell@bsu.edu.
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