Change, Small and Otherwise

Change is an odd thing.  Both the coins that rattle in the bottom of my purse and the events that rattle my world. For one thing, each individual bit of change seems insignificant, but taken together they can add up.

I took one of those Stress Tests recently and after looking at the events decided I really didn't want to know my score. It would be more of a scare than a score! Besides, I already knew that when I considered in all the events that I've been going through...from finances to relationships to death to jobs to health to you name it....it wouldn't be small change at all.


You'd think I'd find change easy since, as I child I lived a very unstable life because of a peripatetic father and a unrooted mother.  Life was always changing.  I can remember going to school one morning and when I was picked up, learning that my parents had sold our home and moved to a different place. But instead of making change easy for me as an adult, it's made it difficult. I resist change from the soul out. I want things to stay the same, to be dependable, to be regular.

I also don't like surprises. Probably because of the unpredictability of my childhood,  I've always read the last chapter of a book first. (Actually, I read the first chapter, meet the characters and then flip to the end.  If I don't like the way it ends, I don't bother reading the middle.) I know that horrifies most novelists and if I wrote novels, I'd probably be horrified, too. (Maybe not. It might just inspire me to make sure the last chapter is so gripping people would want to read the middle, too.) I don't want to get to the end of the book and discover that a favorite character dies unexpectedly or that the ending is disappointing. I'd rather be braced for the pain ahead of time.

This works pretty well for books, but it doesn't work in real life although I would like it to.  I would like to know exactly how this part of my life is going to turn out.  (I'm not entirely unreasonable.  I don't need to know absolutely everything up to and including the day of my death!) It's just that I know there is still more change coming in my life. I can sense that it's almost, but not quite here. But it's coming. I don't know if I should be looking forward to it or dreading it, which is why I'd like to be able to just peek into the future and see which direction things are going to go.

But, as the old saying goes, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. (Maybe we should update that to: if wishes were Porches, beggar would ride!) And so I wait for the change, small and otherwise, that is on its way. Maybe, for once, it will be joyful and positive and I will be glad I wasn't able to read the chapter ahead of time.  I can only hope!