Everything in life had to start somewhere. No matter how comfortable something is, there was a time when it was new. When it was being attempted for the first time. After a time what was new becomes the norm. It's at that point that we are given a chance to stay with that which is already established or try for something else.
It's as though life is a series of stops and starts. If you're lucky life will limit the number of times you have to start over, but it seems to be the nature of living that we return to the beginning over and over. When I was eighteen I felt like I had finally made it to a point where I had a handle on things. I had good friends. I was in a relationship. The nuances of the town I lived in were so familiar that they had become comfortable. In a way I felt like I had arrived. Like I had finally got to my intended destination. This was after years of feeling awkward and somewhat out of place so it was kind of nice to be a point in my life where things felt right. The problem with that time though was that it was limited. I was at the end of childhood and moving on towards becoming an adult. There would only be a brief window where I would feel like that because after graduation it would be time to make decisions on what to do next. Now in those situations there are really two choices. I could have stayed and enjoyed the fact that I had everything I thought I wanted. There's no saying how long it would have lasted, but eventually it would have ended. The other choice was the more painful one. Give it all up for a chance to move onto bigger things. I can't fault people for either choice because each person is different and needs different things. For me though I knew that as much as I wanted to stay that I couldn't. Staying would have meant that I'd give up my chance for something more.
I used to think that life behaved almost like a checklist of achievements. Once you accomplished something then you didn't have to worry about it ever again. No matter what else happened in your life that particular item was checked off. In the years since leaving home and going out on my own I've learned that very few things in life last for any length of time. Since all things end given enough time that means eventually everything has to start brand new at some point. Often these moments come to us when we're already very comfortable in our existing lives. It would be easy to remain fixed and unchanging, but in doing so we limit ourselves to what's beyond right now. I'm not saying that we toss overboard the things in our life that we've established. It's more that we're presented with choices to stick with what we have or go for what comes next. Sometimes it's not even a choice, it's forced on us in a way that our only option is to pick up what's left and move on. Eight months after I graduated from college I was laid off from my first job as a professional. It wasn't something I was expecting considering I had gone to school in order to become marketable and needed in the workforce. It didn't matter what I had prepared for though because I was forced to start over after only being out in the world for a short time. Not long after that I decided to start over again, but this time on my own terms because I knew there were worse things than having to start again.
It's a strange thing to give up what you know for the hope of something better. I know for a lot of people they prefer to stick with the devil they know rather than take a chance on something unknown. I can't really blame them because even in a situation where you're not happy, you at least know what to expect and that brings its own form of comfort. I've found that everything in life has a cost associated with it. Sometimes you have to give up one thing in order to get another. That's just the cost of doing business. Now it's not always true that you're forced to pick between two things, but in a lot of situations we aren't able to have everything, which means something has to take priority. You want your freedom, then you may have to give up everything that's holding you back from being free. You want money, then you may have to spend your free time to get it. You want to be in a place that feels like home, then you have to leave the place that you call home to go find it. All of those situations present us with a choice and we have to decide if we're willing to pay the price associated with what we want.
