GaryTalk #6

Set aside your fear and embrace change.

A fortuitous and at the time quite scary event happened in my life when I was 15 years old. My family moved away from our home in North Carolina to a small town called Beaconsfield outside of London.
We lived there for three years before moving back to the States.

At the time, I DID NOT want to move. I loved my friends, my school, and my life as I knew it. I didn't want to make new friends. My father, sensing my fear, called a family meeting and proceeded to read, out loud, the motivational book "Who Moved My Cheese". I'll sum it up for you in a few sentences: the story is about two mice and two small humans named "Hem" and "Haw". They all live in a maze and eat cheese. The cheese is moved. The mice adapt and find the new cheese, no biggie. The humans do not adapt and cry and mourn and have a giant hissy fit, and then die. The end. Adapt to change. Do not hem and haw. Got it.

Over the next year, there were many challenging moments, but I can not even describe how much my life was affected for the better because of that move. My brother and I became incredibly close, London was our new playground, yet most of all I realized how big and fun and adventurous life can be when you do not live with the fear of change. My dad instigated that move. He took the plunge with the family, one that changed the course of my life for the better.

Now that I am an adult, it is up to me to instigate good changes and not be paralyzed by fear of the unknown. I ask myself: Are you currently happy where you are living? In your career? Want to move out West? Want to go back to school? Want to take 3 months off and hike the Appalachian trail? The biggest plunge that I have taken recently was starting this blog, and at the time I was scared that I wasn't tech savvy enough, that nobody would read it, and that I didn't have the photography or cooking expertise to have a blog. Then, one day, I just did it. Gary says, set aside your fear and embrace change.