Reinventing Yourself
A Travelling Necessity
No Leaders Please by Charles Bukowski:
“Invent yourself and then reinvent yourself,
don’t swim in the same slough.”
Changes
When I was 9 years old, I faced my first “life-changing” event when my parents got divorced. It was the first time I understood that life can morph into something else, something new. Shortly after, when I was 10, my mother decided to relocate me and my brother to a different city. My reality had completely changed in the course of a year an a half. Those two major changes that I went through as a young kid shaped my initial relationship with the experience of change.
I grew up associating change with fear and sadness. Change was something that came from an outside factor (my parents in this case) and came to “take” the things that made me feel secure from me. By the time I was 18, I switched apartments and living situations between my parents around 10 times. Every time a big move or change took place, it was experienced as a terrifying situation and my resistance to it was at the maximum. As a result, I developed an unhealthy relationship to change, basically viewing it as an agent of destruction.
Fast forward to age 25, and change has become something I seek in my life on a daily basis. For the last 4 months, I’ve been traveling/living in 9 different cities across America: from Halifax (Canada) to Buenos Aires (Argentina), I switched apartments/living situations around 20 times. Going from sheltering myself at my apartment in Tel Aviv for the last 5 years to throwing myself into constant changes.
“Go swim in the lake of fear until you feel comfortable in it. Swim until you get to the other side.” Lewis Howes (School Of Greatness Podcast)
After swimming a few months in the lake of change (which is fear for me), I completely transformed my relationship with it. My biggest issue with change when I was growing up was the feeling it was forced upon me. This fact made me resist it as hard as I could with any external change that I faced.
The “Spoon”
This is probably the most famous scene in the movie: “The Matrix”.
“This is not the spoon that bends, only yourself”
This scene brings up the number one question about change: Is change Kexternal or internal? When we experiment with external change, what “bends”? and why?
Rethinking Yourself
A traveler I met in a hostel in Texas told me a line that I’ll never forget: “You have to rethink yourself when put in a different context”.
Every change of environments over the last few months, gave me the unique opportunity to rethink myself. Digging deep into my brain, and playing with the wires.
I take myself wherever I go, and that self can morph according to the necessity of the new environment. Tuning my behavior according to the situation: living in someone else’s house as an Airbnb guest, staying in a room with 6 people in a hostel, or being roommates with someone on a regular contract. Every living arrangement is molding me in a different way, making me rethink my behaviors and habits.
Those many small changes I face on a daily basis, are prepping the ground for asking bigger questions: can I change my entire life’s trajectory? After tutoring math for the last 7 years, I had to ask myself: Is this going to be my life’s work?
Montevideo
When I was in Uruguay, I met an Airbnb host called Susana. We had a conversation about choices we make in life. The conversation was straight out of a movie scene where I was being imparted by her wisdom:
“I’m almost 60, and I’m always thinking what I’m about to do, what am I going to learn this year. I had 4 sons. I lost 2 of them. Life is now, you should live in the now. Take your time, Do what you want to do now. It’s OK to change your mind, even if you did something your entire life, and you want to do or learn something else… do it, it’s OK.”
16 years after my initial introduction to the concept of change, I’m on an exploration to discover how to heal my dynamic with it. As a kid, I was defending from change because I was convinced it came to destroy the things I cared about. From defending to initiating, I switched my positioning with change.
The dance between my resistance and my new capacity to live with change is providing me a healthy tension that is the fuel for my journey. Having my home in the “lake of change”, has given me the gift of rethinking myself on a daily basis. I could’ve woken up one day, 20 years from now, asking: what? why? for how long?
The more I’m exposed to different people and their choices, I’m convinced that our mental health is based on a story we tell ourselves: we know where we are, and where we’re going.
In a society that constantly asks us: “what do you do?” or for the younger: “what are you going to be when you grow up?” Not knowing, is a terrifying option.
“The strongest force in the human personality is the need to be consistent with how you define yourself.” Toni Robbins
Rethinking my choices in life is a process of piling.
Underneath my choices lies who I am, but who I am without my choices is different. If I’m changing my choices, there will be a different me.
My choices are my instruments, and changing those instruments, is changing the music I play.
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