We’re taught to think about our lives as having segments, like the scales of a snake or a scorpion or a lobster. Each piece is connected but discrete with clear boundaries and sharp edges. They touch, they intersect, they interact, but they also keep to their own. Work life, home life, personal life, hobbies, friends, significant other, children, each segment in its own area, each piece adding up to our lives, competing for our attention, needing us to allocate resources, balance priorities, and juggle the masks that we wear.
Because we’re taught that these segments of our lives our discrete, and even that they should be and should be kept that way, we come to expect that they will behave that way. So when we seek to change one, we can be unaware of how it will affect the others. We don’t necessarily see the ramifications of adjusting one or replacing another with something new. We don’t see them as Jenga blocks which depend on each other for how they are positioned in space. We don’t see their connection as anything but incidental, until we pull one out and our life falls apart.
Change doesn’t respect the segregation we set up in our lives. Change sees us as a whole being and that everything we do and are is actually us, therefore any change we make affects everything we are and do to a greater or lesser extent. Taking on a new hobby sends ripples through the family, brings in new friends, adjusts relationships with old ones, brings on new perspectives which cause us to see other aspects of our lives differently. Make changes to eating or exercise habits and ripples flow outward as well as inward. Have a meaningful conversation with a friend and see everything through new eyes. Find a new job and watch how the world shifts in all directions and that there’s a choice between settling into the old patterns or making new ones.
Change doesn’t segregate. Why should we? Jenga anyone?