There are better things ahead than any we leave behind

I was in the midst of a panic spiral. I was thinking of moving to another state for the first time ever, leaving behind family, friends and everything familiar. My friend SV was on the phone, attempting to talk me off the ledge.

“I don’t think I can live in the Eastern time zone,” I argued. “I’m a Central time zone person my whole life. Primetime doesn’t start till 8! Do people in the Eastern time zone not have to get up for work?” (This was pre-DVR and streaming.)

“Uh, I live in the Mountain time zone,” SV said. “It is INSANE. Stuff starts at the most random times. You’ll adjust.”

“But I don’t want to leave behind my friends.”

“You’ll make new friends.”

“I don’t WANT new friends. I like the ones I have.”

In my experience, people approach change in two ways: You’re either a person who thinks about everything you’re gaining, or a person who thinks about everything you’re giving up.

SV is the former, and she is brave and amazing. Right after college, she packed her life into a car and drove to Montana to work for a minor league baseball team. For the past decade, she’s been a foreign service officer for the U.S. State Department, uprooting her life and moving to a new country every 2-3 years.

Me, on the other hand? I put down roots as quickly and deeply as possible. I grew up on a farm owned by my great-grandma, in a house my grandpa built and my dad grew up in. My family’s lived in the same Iowa town since the 1840s. When I did finally choose to move to Michigan (yes, I went through with it), I picked Grand Rapids precisely because it was a large enough city to have cultural and work opportunities, but small enough to be livable long term. (Spending a semester in London and a summer in D.C. taught me that for me, metropolises are much more fun to visit than do daily life in.)

Many of the best things in my life have come from pushing myself out of my comfy little rut and forcing myself to try something new.

I’ve now been in Grand Rapids 20+ years. I’ve been at the same company for 20 years, and whenever I think about applying for jobs somewhere else – yup, I start running through the list of everything I’d be giving up.

And yet. So much of this mindset is about fear, and that’s completely counter to how I want to live my life … and how I want my daughters to live theirs. I believe in living life intentionally, and you can’t do that if you’re always playing defense. I want to be open to opportunities, to the unexpected gifts life can give you – an out-of-the-blue job offer, a chance to start fresh somewhere new, falling in love with someone who has no interest in moving back to Iowa with you. And I want to be able to bend, not break, at the surprises life inevitably brings – loss of a job or spouse, cancer diagnosis, an accident, a financial reversal.

I also know that many of the best things in my life have come from pushing myself out of my comfy little rut and forcing myself to try something new. I intentionally chose a college that no one I knew attended, because I wanted to see who I was apart from the context of multi-generation family associations. It was a transformative experience for my identity, my Christian faith and my life. It was there I met the friend who ended up telling me about the job opening a few years later in Grand Rapids, which prompted my first out-of-state move and where I ended up meeting my husband of 18 years.

And the benefits of trying new things have come not just from the thing itself, but from the mental and emotional stress it’s forced on me. My first year of college was awful. I didn’t get along with my roommate. I had some people I socialized with but no real friends. I felt completely out of place. Same with my first year in GR. I remember those as the loneliest years of my life. Yet I stuck it out and made it through to a positive experience that soon became my new norm, and in the process, I grew. I learned how to solve problems on my own, I learned how to make friends, I learned important lessons about myself.

My first reaction will always be to think of everything I’m giving up. The trick, I’ve learned, is in not letting those hold me back.

I’ll never be an SV, embracing change with gusto. My first reaction will always be to think of everything I’m giving up. The trick, I’ve learned, is in not letting those hold me back. A couple years ago, my best friend gave me a lovely plaque with a C.S. Lewis quote, and I’ve hung it beside my mirror, so each morning I can remind myself, “There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.”