like paper in the wind

Life has been all about change lately. Changing titles, changing offices, changing friends, changing seasons.

In the past, whenever I made a big life-changing decision, like when I transferred colleges, or when I broke up with the first long-time boyfriend, or when I moved to London, I would also change something dramatically about my appearance. When I transferred schools I started dressing differently, switching my colorful cardigans for black and red and vintage. I broke up with my long hair too when I ditched the boy, cutting off ten inches and then dying it from red to black. For London I had grown my hair out again and stopped wearing heels. (I still don't understand how women can wear heels on wet cobblestone streets without sliding and falling every other step.)

This time around, I suppose because there's so much change happening at once, I haven't altered myself physically in any way. I want to keep my hair long-- my husband likes it, and it gives me something to pull when I'm stressed out. My clothes and shoes are basically the same as they have been, although I suppose I've slowly but surely been sneaking in more pencil skirts and higher heels.

I don't like change. Change is a big part of my work and the industry I'm in, but in my personal life I don't like it. It's not that I'm stuck or that I'm afraid. I just really like the way things are, and I like to be in control. That's what it really is, right there, that I don't feel like I'm in control of my own life on days like today.

That's all life really is though, a series of changes, of small and larger occurrences in our life that lead us to change ourselves, alter our thought pattern, move away, stop talking to or start talking to someone, all these seemingly tiny decisions that one by one add up to a lifetime of changes.

For instance, if I had decided to let my orthodontist do what he wanted to my lower jaw and break and reset it (I have an overbite, but geez) my junior year of high school, I would have never gone to Europe on my senior trip that summer which means I would have never started dating my first boyfriend. If I hadn't been dating that first boyfriend when I went to college a year later, I would have chosen a different school perhaps, and then a year after that I never would have thought of transferring. We chose the new school together, where I eventually met the new boyfriend, who became the husband. There are lots of tiny choices in there too that affected the whole progression.

It's a butterfly effect, in a way, but it's all generated by me, by my choices, not just some random occurence, not really. I don't know that I believe in randomness, in haphazard chance, but I don't know that I believe in fate either.

I do know that the more things change in my life, the more I cling to the things that matter most to me, the things that I want to be the most unchanging, like my relationship with my husband and my family, and my internal voice. I don't want anything, random or planned, big or small, to alter those.