We all make plans; we make lists of places we want to visit, people to see, stuff to get done. Don’t get me wrong, making plans is great, and put me down as a fan of bucket lists, which I call things to look forward to. What can change, though, is that something outside of our imagined possibilities pops up and we have to adjust. The pandemic was one of those things. There was no doubt someone out there who had “plan for pandemic” in their calendar; however, for most of the planet, it was a total shocker. I would argue that we are still not back to normal, as this past year has been a reaction to and a make-up-the-distance sprint from the lockdowns. Next year we may be back to a less pandemic-reactive rhythm.
This all reminds us that we humans are incredibly adaptive, which is great news for our futures. When presented with new information or new circumstances, we can suddenly make a 180-degree turn. The absolutely-never-no-way-impossible becomes an interesting prospect to be investigated. As the saying goes, never say never, because things change and we adapt. Jobs, relationships, homes, whole ways of life can take a radical turn. Because we like to plan and in order to do so some amount of consistency is required, when faced with newness, we often dig our heels in and say: no, no, no, not me. Depending on what we are talking about, that can be a solid statement of one’s core values or it can be fear of something that, although different, may be a whole lot better.
Four years ago, while sitting in my downtown LA loft, my current situation of now recovering from knee surgery in, of all places, the mountains of Utah was not anywhere in my most vivid acid-tripped-out imagination. Being a speaker on stage in front of hundreds of people used to be my idea of waterboarding, and now I love it. Really, speaking in front of a group was a never-ever-only-at-gunpoint thing for me. And get this, I am exploring the idea of spending more time in the place I ran from 15 years ago, NYC. New day, new facts, new thoughts. You may still find me running back to Utah, tail between legs; let’s see.
I rather like the loose garment approach to these matters: try it on for a while and see how it fits. We may find ourselves rather liking another country or, having spent a life in some rural ideal, find that dense cities have some upsides, too. Or not. The key is not to dismiss what may seem outrageous without prior investigation, and maybe a bit of self-experimentation. We tend to all see our lives as having a fixed trajectory, which I am sorry to say is a myth. When something unsettling happens, we often initially crave the certainty of returning to the known path. As Malcolm Gladwell likes to point out, we have these wonderfully adaptive brains; we can change our minds, moving in new ways to new destinations, if we want to. It is comforting to know that wherever we go, whoever we are with, whatever we are doing, we are still us, just wearing different clothes — which we may learn to prefer. The most regrettable mistakes I have made were never the give-it-a-try ones, they seem to always be the missed-opportunity because I just didn’t do enough investigation. Lessons learned.
Onward and upward,
David
