What I’m Learning About Navigating Transitions
What I’m Learning About Navigating Transitions
Let yourself go slowly. It’s easy for me to want to just go full-steam ahead and plow my way through something to get to the destination I have set my eyes on. But that means I can easily bulldoze people who get in my way, simply trying to offer help, because I don’t want to slow down to live in the present in favor of chasing down some elusive point of arrival I’ve imagined in the future.
Be okay with doing just one thing at a time. This goes hand-in-hand with going slowly, but is a separate point as well. I’m task-oriented. I like checking things off my list. I like having my physical space tidy and my planner relatively uncluttered with tasks and plans.
But sometimes I can’t have everything that way right away. Sometimes I need to be okay with cleaning out just one drawer in a day or getting one load of laundry done instead of the ten things I had hoped to accomplish in five hours.
Choose to be honest. As an introvert and optimist, I don’t love opening up to everyone about the stress and struggles of navigating new seasons. If people ask how I’m doing or how things are going, I’m most likely going to respond by saying they’re going well, even if the most complete answer is more complicated and nuanced.
But I’m learning to pause long enough to give an honest, more complete answer to the people who deserve it, the people who are close enough and have worked to build a relationship strong enough to get the truth, not some knee-jerk “It’s good!” answer.
This is also the only way to really get solid encouragement and solidarity. I’ve been surprised how many people have identified with my feelings and experiences, and simply sharing them has been an encouragement to me.
Have a place for everything and everything in its place. It’s kind of a cliche, but it is so for a reason. When I was moving everything I owned from the townhouse I shared with my sister to my then fiance’s house, I chose to unpack as I went. I didn’t have ideal places for everything, and I’ve moved things around quite a bit in the weeks since the wedding, but it was incredibly helpful to try to find places for everything for a few reasons.
First, it helped prevent a mountain of boxes piling up to unpack later, which would be a daunting and more time-consuming task. It also helped make the house feel more like my home, instead of just my fiance’s. It’s been an adjustment for us both, of course, but it was easier to move my things into the house in stages instead of overwhelming the both of us at once.
And finding a place for things as I moved them also helped us see what we had, see what we could still add, and see what we needed to get rid of. It was sort of like an exchange, an imperfect one-in, one-out rule that allowed for more new things to come in at this point without having an item go out in exchange every time, but there was some measure of exchange that could only happen as I unpacked the shower gifts and my own possessions as replacements or swaps for some existing items, and piling up things both of us no longer needed in the garage.
Creating a giant pile of things in the garage to go through on their way to the donation center is maybe not the best plan, as it creates an intimidating task of going through it later. I moved so many things around when my then fiance wasn’t home or was mowing the lawn or otherwise occupied because that was simply when I had time. That meant that many items made their way to the donation pile in the garage without his input, so it became a “what do we do with this?” pile that we needed to go through again.
And most people would tell you that it would be more efficient to only have to go through things once. So take my advice and sort through things you’re getting rid of in the moment with the people who are affected by them or would have valuable input. At most, put together a small pile or small box, no one you yourself could fit inside and can barely drag through the house and into the garage-- and then proceed adding to after it’s been moved.
Have you navigated any big (or small) transitions lately? What did you learn from them? I’d love to hear from you!
