I don’t know exactly when it happened. Sometime, though, during late childhood, I contracted what Hubby Guy would call a terrible disease. I rearrange rooms. I move furniture from room to room and re-imagine where everything goes. I make it better again and again and again… and again. Also, the disease can be very contagious. My youngest daughter caught a very chronic version of it early on and has a flare-up 4 to 5 times per year. There is no cure.

     I never realized my condition was anything but good and wonderful until I married Hubby Guy. I discovered quickly that not all people believe in rearranging. He told me that were it up to him he would nail the furniture to the floor. I thought he was kidding. One day while he was gone, I rearranged our bedroom. Upon coming home and seeing what I had done, he lost his cool. It is the one and only time in our marriage that he made me cry. I spent about 4 hours that day rearranging the room and then putting it back exactly as it was. The good news was the room was very clean. The bad news was we realized we had a problem. He ended up giving me free rein over the furniture in the whole house, except the bedroom. We have moved since then. We’ve been in our current house for almost 11 years and we have rearranged the bedroom exactly once. That only happened because I had a very legitimate reason for wanting to do so.  I also know it will never happen again.

     There is definitely something to be said for the familiar. I like things to have a place and be in their place … except furniture. There is more than one way to achieve the familiarity that we all find comforting. Each to his/her own. I was considering why I like to move things around. No matter what angle I looked at it, I kept landing on the word contentment. There are countless aspects of life where we can find contentment. For me, my home is the easiest place to exercise some creativity for a fix of fresh environmental newness. To sit in a pristinely clean room and observe my domain from a new aspect gives me a feeling of contentment that I cannot adequately explain. Maybe I am crazy, but I don’t think so.

    I think we all feel torn between familiarity and the promise of newness. We tend to stick to the familiar. We eat at the same restaurants.  We shop at the same stores. We unwittingly create deep ruts for ourselves. Every now and again we realize what we have done and find ourselves in “a pickle” of our own making. That is the very place I find myself as I write today. In this particular instance, the pandemic is the catalyst that shook me from my familiar cadence long enough to realize how discontent I have become in a particular area of life. I knew pre-pandemic, but the cadence of the comfortable familiar made it easy to ignore the steadily intensifying sound of newness calling … and I really like newness. But, it is so hard to forsake familiarity, even when the newness could be so very good.

     We need to be careful, you and I. There is nothing at all wrong with familiarity, but it can become a stronghold. It can keep us in a place where we weren’t meant to stay. We can figuratively nail down our lives, but doing so may rob us of the very best life has to offer, or dare I say our destinies.  Sometimes in life, we will need to look at things from a different vantage point to know which direction to head next. Change, whether it be furniture, job, location, or community, can be a really good thing… a necessary thing.  So let’s guard ourselves against becoming overly content with the familiar and always leave room for changes when necessary. That is a sure-fire way to make sure we aren’t becoming stagnant and stuck.