The BIG small Changes
Due to road construction, her commute changed. The family got a pet. The kid needed a tutor, so you found them one. An injury or illness that takes a while to fully heal.
Unplanned pregnancy. Your child unexpectedly becomes a parent. Death. A new house. A new job or promotion. Relocation. You decide to go back to school for just one class at a time.
The common denominator is change. Although the bottom half of the list gets all of the attention for change, the top half is significant, too. The difference is that we don’t see the tsunami that comes with the top half. Because we perceive certain types of change as relatively minor, we take them in stride and try to casually absorb them into our routines. In turn, we don’t fully notice how they change our routines, which, in essence, changes our lives.
Change is unavoidable and significant, yet we build our lives around routine. The main reason that we do it is that the brain prefers routine. Seriously. Think about it: have you ever said, “once I get this down pat, I’m going to be fine”? The reason that you feel relieved when you get it down pat is that your confidence increases with repetition, and you’ve probably found ways to make it easier for yourself. Our entire lives are structured this way. We want to know things like the backs of our hands so that we can reduce the amount of effort that we need to do them. Therefore, we preserve our energy for things that come up that are not routine.
When our routines are set, we build the things we want to do around them. For example, you know which day is best to stop by the grocery store when you need to get in and out. You know that your partner sleeps in on Saturdays, so you schedule your quiet time or hair appointment early. You know that you can join that group that meets on Wednesday evening and eat dinner as a family if you cook enough to have leftovers on Tuesdays.
Your routine keeps you from feeling overwhelmed because it puts part of your brain on autopilot. It frees you from the mental stress of having to decide everything every day. On the other hand, when your routines are permanently interrupted by the small things that you don’t recognize as change, you don’t acknowledge the loss of efficiency and comfort. You don’t notice that you have stopped going to yoga or that you miss talking to the lady in the grocery store since you started having your groceries delivered to save time. You don’t notice the micro deposits of exhaustion until your balance is high.
Then, something between a tango and maybe a fight comes into existence as you try to lower the balance. You want to drop the accumulation of inconspicuous small changes that created a life that you didn’t want then and, increasingly, can’t stand now. However, you don’t want to deal with it. After all, you didn’t really deal with it when the balance began growing. You know it’s going to take some work to change the terms of agreement with the people in your life. But the exhaustion is wearying.
What will it cost you to continue carrying a high balance? What will it cost the people in your life for you to carry change so silently, so resentfully, so sorrowfully? It’s going to be hard either way. Which hard will you choose?
