Ready for a Change

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“To put meaning in one’s life may end in madness, But life without meaning is the torture Of restlessness and vague desire-it is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.” ~ Edgar Lee Masters

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.” ~ Anaïs Nin

I’ve been feeling restless lately and ready for something new. One of my character flaws is that I do not understand people who resist change. It’s hard for me to understand living in one place for an entire lifetime, or working at the same job or thirty years, or never learning anything new.

I suspect I love change so much because I got a healthy dose of my father’s wanderlust. He was always looking for a better way to support us, consequently we moved a lot. But I think part of the reason we moved so often was because once dad had learned all he could from one job, he was ready to move on and learn something new. I’m feeling like that now. I’ve been teaching at our local community college for nine years and I’m ready for some new ideas or even a change of job.

When I got the idea to direct Measure for Measure I wanted to do it because I had never directed a Shakespeare play before. As I began working on it, I had a strong feeling that this was my swan song at Cochise College. I don’t know if this is true but I’ve got that feeling of wanderlust. I want to write in a new genre, take a class or two in subjects I’ve never tried before, go on vacation to a new location, or … I don’t know. I’m waiting for inspiration!

Even though I love changing career directions, or creative projects often, sometimes I envy people who have one focus for their lives. They have one thing they are interested in doing and they spend their entire lives learning and working in the same field. It must be satisfying to dig deeply into a subject always learning something on an ever deeper level.

I guess I’ve done that with theatre and hope to do that with writing too. The arts, or any kind of creative endeavor is like that, the creator never stops learning. Since that’s true, maybe my restlessness is not so much about careers, but something else. A stirring of some kind at a soul level, something whispering to me to break out and try something new.

Maybe I’ll finally learn Spanish or go on vacation, or meet some new people, or I just don’t know. I hope this next week during spring break, I’ll get a clue.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate your comments and likes.

Lucinda is the author of The Space Between Time, an award finalist in the “Fiction: Fantasy” category of the 2017 Best Book Awards. It’s a historical, time-travel, magical realism, women’s novel, and is available in all ebook formats at Smashwords, and print-on-demand at Amazon and other fine book sellers. To join her email list, click here. She will never sell the names on her list.