My beloved ninety-four year old neighbor used this phrase with me today. And though I know the meaning, as the Rhetorician, of course I looked it up. And thought about its connotations and associations a bit more.
It is defined as a welcome departure or loss.
Often used in the phrase: “Good riddance to bad rubbish!”
I thought about all the losses in my life and how many of us lose many things throughout life, places, positions, pets, loved ones, many things that we think we cannot do without, or live without.
I certainly have.
As I process change and loss, I think about how in some ways I am still the little girl who hated change. Who resisted it with every fiber of my being.
Though it seems odd, perhaps, because I was someone who went on to make a lot of changes in life, different from my family members and people in the area where I came from—
After all, I moved away, to another state to go to college, which required a lot of change and expanding my worldview. Moving away from my beloved mother and disrupting our co-dependent relationship.
I moved abroad to Indonesia which created a lot of change in my life and stayed for five years.
I pushed myself to pursue higher education even though that meant changing myself.
I made choices to leave a marriage even when staying would have been the comfortable thing, the one that would require little change.
I have moved across the country a few times for work, three times, which required change.
But the truth is, though I do it and know that I have to, because I fear stagnancy, it doesn’t mean change comes easy to me or that I always embrace it wholeheartedly.
I still struggle with change. I am aware enough to know that this is largely because I grew up in a volatile and unstable background, with parents who had addiction and mental illness, and there wasn’t a sense of safety and security. I wanted to keep things the same and have all be as it was/had been because it afforded me a sense of sameness and stability.
As a girl, I remember being so insistent that I did not want to advance a grade, and leave a teacher and class, that my mother said that I could stay back if I really felt so strongly about it. At that moment, I changed my mind but largely because I knew that “being held back” carried with it this meaning that I was not able to advance; it made a statement about my learning and how smart I was, at least it did to my young self; that is what it suggested. So I said no and went on. But it wasn’t easy.
I resist change.
And yet, paradoxically, I also wholeheartedly believe that to enjoy life we need to embrace change and the passage of time, as James Taylor teaches us.
I think about one of my favorite quotes from author Edith Wharton:
“The secret to a long and happy life can be uncovered: If one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things and happy in small ways.”
Change in life is inevitable. The more resist it, the unhappier we will be. And because: “change will come as surely as the seasons and ten times as fast” as “Little Women” tells us.
There were changes in my life I thought I would not make it through, but I did. We do. Humans’ resiliency and ability to move on, push forward, struggle on and survive, to adapt, is amazing.
I have to remember to count myself in that. Part of my survivor identity.
I may not always like change and I have my moods where I feel that I am going kicking and screaming through unwelcome changes in life, but I also have to keep in mind….to remind myself….
To keep at the forefront of my mind and make myself to always, always remember that-
Sometimes, though excruciatingly painful, change is good. It is necessary. It denotes growth, healing, transformation.
Nothing is worse than stagnancy for me…getting ‘stuck’ in one place. I saw my family members do that and I long ago decided that that is simply not an option for me, to live a different life.
If that is my fear, then I need to learn to co-exist among change and to embrace it as a friend, a lifelong companion, and moreover, an important teacher in much of life and life’s hardest and most important lessons.
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