Something New

Occasionally I feel this acute longing for changes. Once you reach some kind of stability in life, it won’t be long before it starts burdening you with its sense of predictability and boredom. And you are surprised at your own thoughts of how much you want to escape this trouble-free life and go explore wilderness, or do something equally crazy. Then your favorite word becomes N-E-W, and you search for new anything to satisfy the craving of novelty that threatens to overturn your stable world. I guess it’s the impact of spring as well in a way it sharpens and fortifies your desires, and makes you look so far away and almost see something big there. Something is coming for you. New. Big.

These thoughts equally excite and scare me. Sometimes I fear that holding back too much will only result in a leap forward, some radical act to quiet the itching once and for all. I had my share of crazy acts in the past. But then I pulled back and did what they call settling down. And my life felt smaller. Comfortable and safe, but small, almost invisible.

So I decided to partner with the N-E-W in a different way and explore life from that perspective. I hear people saying all the time – if only I had a new job, a new house, a new spouse, a new (fill in the blank), my life would improve in an instant. I can’t be fooled by this utopic thinking. Because new becomes old pretty quickly, and how many Big New changes can you incur in a lifetime? It’s not like you can buy a new house every two months (and even that will become old pretty soon).
And I figured I should stick with a small N-E-W and hope to compensate its overall lack of bigness by quantity and diversity. I looked for small new things every day: a new book added to my to-read list, a new idea fished from someone’s blog that gave me food for thought, a new word that I stumbled upon and lookup up in thesaurus. I bought new curtains for my bedroom that fully block the sun and create this awesome, inexperienced before darkness every morning. I cut my hair. I wrote to people I didn’t write to before. I paired items of closing it didn’t occur to me to wear together before. I tried new kind of ice-cream.

And if I still long for some newness, I write a new blog post because it’s a sure way to create something new, something that never existed before. It guarantees enough satisfaction and sense of achievement, and it helps me get a healthy dose of novelty, without overdoing it, or getting overemotional. Every day can be a source of N-E-W, but rather than waiting for it to knock on your front door, go and get it.