A little food for thought: change

Lifestyle

September 7, 2019

‘Change’ has been such a charged word recently. It seems people are always talking about how we should embrace change, work towards change, or be changemakers, but if we strip that word down to its core what do we get?

When sitting down to write this week’s blog post, I was initially at a loss; what should I write about? I feel like I’ve talked about going back to school, being the new kid etc… enough times that it’s almost tiresome. So, I decided to talk about something that is highly relevant in my life at the moment: change.

We experience it every day, something new happens and we roll with the punches, but there are a few times in our lives when we face huge changes. For me, I just started my senior year of high school and I’m facing the daunting task of applying to college and deciding what I want to do for the rest of my life and where I want to spend it. Do I stay with a place that is familiar to me? Do I stay inside my comfort zone? Do I study something challenging? And to be completely honest, it’s a scary task to decide what changes to make.

Not everyone’s change is like mine; most expats are facing change at the moment as we all return from our summer breaks to old friends having left our home and new people arriving. It always takes a little while, but eventually, we get used to the changes we face every day: we schedule calls with friends who moved away, we connect with new people who have just moved to our city, we embrace the small differences. Change is waving goodbye to the familiar and watching a wave of unfamiliarity wash in, but soon that unfamiliarity becomes familiarity and we forget that it was even daunting or unknown in the first place.

When I first moved to Dubai almost six years ago now, it was such a scary change for me, something completely out of my comfort zone. However, looking back on it now this new life in Dubai seems so familiar and comfortable to me, I can’t imagine what it would have been like if I had never moved. The unfamiliar became familiar.

The changes and choices we decide to make each day determine things in our life years down the line that we don’t even know about yet. Each day we are forced to make thousands of small choices: what time to wake up, what to wear, what to eat, and each choice has a specific outcome that will affect something else in turn. We can’t control everything in our lives, but we can control the choices we make. We have to ensure that with each choice we make, we make it with purpose and passion so that the few things we can control are exactly what we want to be doing and we can make positive change. We can set a tone for everything that follows by making purposeful choices.

Let me leave you with some food for thought for the next week:

“Change your thoughts and change your world” – Normal Vincent Peale

This week I challenge all of you to make purposeful and powerful choices; let me know in the comments what you think!

See you next week,

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