Wednesday Wisdom #7 -Hanging baskets

I’m in a bad mood. It’s been weeks of carrying an unimaginable range of stresses, a list of which I won’t subject you to, and for once when I sit down to write I have nothing to say. During the course of a regular week I notice something in nature that I plan to write about, and I sit down with anticipation, but this week there is just an absence.

I’ve been looking out the window at the coffee shop when my eye catches some outrageous flower baskets that the local flower club plants every year. They are abundant and hang overflowing. They have been positioned so their trails do not cover the walk sign illuminated below. Sometimes in the morning a little truck pulls up with an ingenious device on the back of it and a city worker waters each of the baskets with a massive hose on a stick. For years now I have sat in this window uncomfortably aware of how jealous I am of the city worker. I wish my job were to water flowers.

But here I am, still a professor.

I don’t know what it says about our society that someone as aware as I am, someone as driven, someone as well-resourced as me finds it nearly impossible to leave their toxic job for something better. There are the typical explanations, I have a mortgage (well, now I have two! more on that in another newsletter), I have children (now two as well!), but those explanations don’t quite cover it. Why is change so unreasonably difficult?

I’ve had reason to reflect on change lately. A few weeks ago my taller-than-average son was climbing into the back seat of my little two-door sports car. He hit his knee on the back of the passenger seat and he looked at me with rage and said, “I don’t fit in this car anymore.” There were some big repairs on the horizon, so my partner and I decided it was time to trade it in for something new.

In the days leading up to selling the car I found myself lingering at the front door, looking at my car in the driveway. I really loved that car. I kept telling myself I would go drive it at night in the countryside, spend some time with it, but I couldn’t bear the drive being “the last one,” so I never did.

I may have enjoyed looking at her more than driving her.

When the day finally came we went to the dealership and found a car that we both liked that had significantly more room for my son (and for transporting flowers!). As we drove out of the dealership I found that I wasn’t sad at all. I was ready for the change.

Hazel noticeably less excited than we are about the new car.

I wonder how often our fear of change is itself more difficult than that which the change requires. I wonder how often we lose our flow in fear.

Less fear, more flow,

Ann