A Moving Experience
My wife and I just completed a move from Minnesota to Iowa, a process which required nearly four years. We found our new home by serendipity in 2003 during a trip to the town where our older daughters would attend college. It was a home that caught our attention and in a fit of curiosity we scheduled an appointment to tour inside. At the time, that action felt like a mistake, because inside was a lovely home with our fingerprints all over it. Our circumstances were such that a move was impossible, due to my work and the presence of our younger twins still at home. So we shook our heads at what might have been and put the experience out of conscious thought.
This proved to be a difficult achievement, as each visit to our daughters over the next 2 1/2 years took us past the house on the hill, with its “For Sale” sign still visible. Finally, upon my early retirement in 2005, we acted upon that sign’s promise and bought the home, albeit with a promise to our then-high school seniors that we would not leave our longstanding home in Minnesota until they had finally completed their senior year.
The younger twins are now graduated and college-bound, so the time arrived for us to make the final move on June 7. Despite nearly two years of a gradual “moving in,” the final move created the usual mess and chaos in which we have reveled for the past several weeks. What a change!
A great many friends and acquaintances have remarked to us that the move must be a monumental upheaval in our lives, especially after 32 years in our Minnesota home. They have shaken their heads at times and noted that it’s not usually healthy for people to take on too much change too quickly, that the relatively simultaneous and major shifts such as early retirement, encountering the empty-nest syndrome, assuming new work responsibilities, selling a home and moving to a new community could combine to create stresses potentially significant and dangerous. I have appreciated their concerns and the evidence that would seem to support such fears. But I’m afraid that I don’t buy into it.
I have observed many times in this space that the reality of our lives is that the pace and amount of change confronting us is growing exponentially, and that if we can’t recognize, embrace and leverage ourselves on the back of such transformations we are doomed to be left behind by it all. So while the physical and emotional rigors of the past several years have been extraordinary, they have also energized and refreshed us in ways that we never anticipated. Enormous change is always pregnant with unexpected growth and experience and we are made better because of it.
Like the rest of us average folks, business managers really struggle with this. In their case, it shows more because they are charged with leading the rest of us to success and fulfillment. But their abilities to use the power of change to our collective advantage stem from their recognition of the truth of it. Only that acceptance can prompt an overt seizure of the notion and determination to wrestle it to advantage.
So I offer here one small spark of data to help fuel the recognition in all of us. If you doubt the reality of the change that is around us, I invite you to view the linked video clip did_you_know_movie.wmv 6140K Download.
And then, go house-hunting. It’ll stir you….
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