I am heading off to Puglia this August for a job. I should be hugely excited and I am but I am terrified in equal measure. I am not quite sure why as Italy is my favourite place in the whole wide world. Perhaps it is a fear of leaving my routine. Perhaps it is worry because my parents are getting older and I don’t know how many more summers I will have with them, perhaps it is after lockdown I have become rather entrenched in my home life and don’t really want to leave, perhaps it is because I am on my own and tired of having to make that leap of faith each time without being quite sure how everything will pan out… perhaps it is because I am quite happy with my country home life at the moment and don’t really know why it has to change.
I have never been very good with change. Before heading to Kenya for my first teaching job I was paralyzed by fear, incapable of doing anything for myself, my mother had to literally pack my suitcase and drive me to the airport. I have been told that, on arrival, I looked like a rabbit in the headlights! I am hopeless at throwing things out too, clothes, old toys, even throwing mouldy old tents in our loft from my father’s army days I am incapable of parting with. My brothers can hop on a plane and head to work in Switzerland just like that but I struggle a little. I am always afraid to leave what I know, afraid I may not fit in, afraid I may not enjoy the lifestyle, afraid that I will miss my swims in the river at home with the dogs running through the barley fields, afraid that the experience will change me into a worse version of myself, not a better.
Change can sometimes be scary, I have always found it scary but it can be pretty exciting too. Exciting to have the time and chance to explore somewhere new, exciting to have fewer, or at least different, pulls on our time, exciting to have the opportunity to start anew- make your own mark on things without any pre-existing prejudices getting in the way, exciting to have a breath of fresh air. Exciting to experience a perspective on the world that is different from our own. I can be very entrenched in my own views and way of life and sometimes a change is all we need to realise that we are capable of so much more than the four walls that surround us, capable of putting a mark on the world that is uniquely us and seeing the world with new eyes and realising how lucky we are to live in it. Change is never as scary as we think and sometimes you just have to get on with it.
