I’ve always said that I can make a home wherever I am. “Home is where my heart is”, I tell my husband, meaning him. I spent the bulk of my childhood growing up in Sydney’s leafy northern suburbs. My home growing up was a block back from the Lane Cove National Park, close to the Great North Walk, which winds its way up to Newcastle. In my 20’s I hung around Glebe and the Inner West. I also lived and studied in South America for a year. I’ve enjoyed each of these homes and there’s bits and pieces of each place that makes up who I am. I imagine anyone one else who’s lived in different cities or suburbs or countries could say the same. The last few years have been the happiest of all for me: a blissful bubble of utopian joy spent in Manly on Sydney’s northern beaches, just a five-minute walk from the most beautiful city beach I’ve ever experienced.
Earlier this year, however, a certain change-in-the-air which had been lingering over our family for some time, meant we would move to Hurstville in Sydney’s south. So we upped and left Paradise, just like that, and we’ve been living on The Dark Side for five months now.
We knew it was time for a change because we had a routine that was very comfortable. We had a trajectory which was very straight. Fortunately, we both got the fidgets at about the same time and started talking about what change might look like in our life. One of the decisions was to move away from Manly.
I am someone who anticipates change with genuine enjoyment. Have you ever experienced one of those limited-edition children who always looks forward to going back to school at the beginning of the year? That was me. I loved it because everything was new and exciting. As long as I can remember, I have been able to get enthusiastic about change. But this decision to move to the other side of Sydney was a big one for me. While I still knew that home is always where my heart is, I found it emotionally difficult to leave the place where I had made my first proper grown-up home. I cried the night we left. It felt like too much was at stake to make the change. Perhaps I’d never before had something I’d really cherished on the line.
Despite my misgivings, our relocation had a really positive effect. With this move, as with others, I have again realised that with change comes a heightening of the senses. Everything is suddenly interesting because everything is new. True, in Hurstville, we no longer looked out our window to glimpses of the ocean. It turned out though that I looked forward to every train ride to work, and every morning jog became an exploration. There was no routine at first. We had to create it from scratch for ourselves and I loved the excitement that it brought. I had forgotten about that.
It hasn’t been all roses. Some of it’s been tough because even though change drives and stimulates me, routine comforts me. Even so, in the last five months, I’ve learned again to notice the small things around me and I’ve realised that this is what was missing from the comfort of the last few years. We were lacking detail. Or maybe it wasn’t so much that we were lacking detail but just that we didn’t notice it anymore. I think we’d lost our curiosity.
Looking back on the change, I can say I’ve learnt that if life starts to feel too comfortable and a little monotonous, differ your routine. Do something new. It definitely doesn’t have to be something big like moving house because even small changes heighten our thinking and stimulate us. They make us question why we do what we do and help us see things from a new perspective. I think that learning to include both routine and change in our lives is a really healthy exercise and a positive way to grow as a person.
What’s an area of your life that you feel is becoming monotonous and in which you would like to try a change? What’s something you’ve learnt from a recent big or small change?
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