Twenty Tiny Transitions

[resonant]

This is an exercise from a magazine article that intrigued me: "If you're having a hard time coping with change, make a list of 20 tiny transitions you could make that will improve your life. These can include anything from replacing the shower curtain to getting some business cards printed to buying new socks. Such small gestures can acclimate you to change."

I must be somewhat in this mode already, since this month I've bought new socks, replaced my windshield wiper blades, and ordered a piece of artwork from Etsy, but it was surprisingly difficult to come up with twenty!

Warning: what's behind the cut is incredibly mundane.



1. Buy a file cabinet. Get the files out of my room.
2. Add a fruit course to dinner once a week.
3. Move my bed away from the wall. (It's cold there and the street light gets in my eyes anyway.)
4. Clean out the car.
5. Find somewhere else to put the little rocking chair that's too small for everyone including the kidlet.
6. Put cinnamon on my cereal in the morning.
7. Read a nonfiction book for a change.
8. Walk up and down the stairs at work after lunch so I don't get so drowsy in the afternoon.
✓ 9. Change the folder I use for computer backgrounds.
10. Put the kidlet's bike on top of the lawnmower (at least until spring) so there's more room in the garage.
11. Try doing my writing in pen instead of pencil.
12. Buy a new pair of earrings.
13. Hang something different in my kitchen window, and put Aunt Bet's bird ornament back with the Christmas stuff.
14. Grab an evergreen branch from the yard and put it in a vase someplace.
15. Put out new toothbrushes for everyone.
16. Park in a different spot at work.
17. Put some new exercises in my Wii Fit routine.
18. Buy a new broom. (Anyway the old one is contaminated with half-rotten wet moldy cat food that was hiding in the far back corner under the hutch where the cats eat, and now it -- the broom, not the hutch -- smells.)
19. Switch seats at the dinner table.
20. Take a different route to work sometimes. (Before my dad retired, he used to refuse ever to drive to work the same way two days in a row. "In case someone is following me," he explained.)

Comments

[sara]

Ha. My dad used to pull over, if he thought someone was following him, and wait for them to drive past. Usually he didn't follow them, because he is a little more mature than that (but not much).

I put big hooks into the garage rafters to hang disused bicycles from (I have perhaps more disused bicycles than many people), which didn't take long and got a lot of crap off my garage floor (for my next trick, I maybe need to stop keeping three half-disassembled bicycles in my garage, given that we have multiple actively-used bikes here too. Oh well. Not yet.)

[resonant]

Hm. Does putting big hooks into the garage rafters involve actually getting up on a ladder with a power drill, or is there some way to do it by magic? Our garage actually has an "attic," but in order to get into the space, you have to pull a string to loosen a hook that holds a cord that lets down the stairs, and the cord broke in 1994, and I haven't yet gotten around to fixing it ...

Possibly I need to be looking for Twenty Titanic Transitions.

[sara]

I don't think it will magically do itself, no.

Our attic is...well, it's not really a usable space. Really short and full of blown-in insulation. I tried to get in there once to install a tube skylight in the bathroom and finally gave up and hired a really skinny nimble friend of ours to do it. I am coordinated but not like that.

[raveninthewind]

Hmmm. Note to self: That might be a good exercise to do in order to kick-start my motivation.

I salute your efforts to improve your life, no matter how mundane.

[resonant]

It was kind of a neat exercise in that it showed me how very much of a creature of habit I am. I seriously hesitated for five minutes before writing down the one about switching seats at dinner!

[carolyn_claire]

I bought new socks today! I feel my life getting better, already. (Or my feet getting warmer, at least.) I've been working on this sort of thing--small changes/improvements--for a while, and also working at thinking of them not as chores but as good things that I'm doing to improve my surroundings and my general well being. Sometimes it's getting rid of things, sometimes it's organizing things, sometimes it's buying new things to organize other things or to replace non-functioning things or to do things that will make my life easier, somehow. (This includes new earrings. There are few things that pack as much power to uplift into such a small, inexpensive package as new earrings, whether I wear them very often or not.) The idea of doing mundane things differently just because they're different...is intriguing. Keeps one flexible? Builds immunity to cheese moving? That's something to think about.

(I'm also intrigued by how many people's fathers seem to have thought that they might have been being followed to the extent that they devised plans to deal with it. Secret Agent Man syndrome?)

[anatsuno]

(I'm also intrigued by how many people's fathers seem to have thought that they might have been being followed to the extent that they devised plans to deal with it. Secret Agent Man syndrome?)

Hee, yes, same here!

[daegaer]

I was once tootling along on a very empty road, then looked in my rear-view mirror to see a motorcycle cop had appeared from nowhere right behind me, and was vehemently signalling for me to pull over. My very first thought was, "Oh no, my secret identity has been discovered!" Luckily it hadn't, as he was merely the outrider for some government ministers' limos and was but sweeping away peons who were holding up their return from the airport.

*facepalm*

[anatsuno]

:D

One my all-time favorite fanfic moments (because it so adequately puts into words a great truth that we all lived through once or twice in various ways) is in Speranza's MVP, in a scene when John and Rodney, on Earth, are busy packing their stuff, including cat stuff, because the intend to smuggle Rodney's cat back to Atlantis.. And there's a knock at the door and they look at each other panicked, clearly both thinking HOLY SHIT IT'S THE CAT POLICE.

I just.

Yes.

I'm pleased your secret identity was not exposed that day!

[resonant]

I always thought my dad was trying to stave off boredom; I know he didn't like his job, and he'd worked in the same building for like twenty years at that point.

[resonant]

I love socks. And earrings.

Builds immunity to cheese moving?

That's exactly the reason why I did it. We need to make some major changes in our lives -- basically new careers in a new town -- and we are so not spontaneous change-loving people. But I'm going to be really pissed at myself if I wake up one morning and it's time to move to a retirement home and I'm still in Corntown.

[norah]

I like this idea. I'm not sure that I could get to 20, but I could probably scare up 10...it's hard, because I tend to do the tiny stuff as it comes, so what's left is the kind of stuff that belongs on a to-do list, because it has to be planned for and takes time.

Hmmm.

[resonant]

I probably don't know you as well as I feel like I do, but you give the impression of being pretty cool with change in general -- even seeking it out. I'm quite the opposite, and the reason this exercise intrigued me was because it seemed like a way to force myself to get comfortable with some low-key kinds of change.

[norah]

Heh. I think of myself as "change-averse" but I am probably not, at least not on this scale. I just tend to prefer my life a little routinized. I work hard to expand it, though, because I do think that most small things are hardest to do the first and second times, and then become part of a vocabulary of "things I can do" that enriches my life.

[ellen_fremedon]

Huh. That's an interesting idea. I'm in that state where I want to change EVERYTHING IN MY LIFE, but because I'm blocked on the big changes, I can't seem to make any of the little ones-- I can't bring myself to put any effort into organizing my living space because I just want to pack it all up and move, I can't bring myself to start any writing projects because I ought to be spending the time job-searching, et bloody cetera.

Maybe I ought to do this.

[fullygoldy]

totally random from person you don't know:

Maybe you could "organize your living space" by "packing up" ?? Put all 'non-essential for the next x mos' stuff into neatly labeled packing boxes, and neatly stack them in one location - you'll feel organized, and might possibly start unblocking - and you'd be ready to move when your job search turns up something cool in another location.

Or not. I'm just gonna pull my nose out of your business now :)

[resonant]

That sounds so familiar. I'm in a kind of circular relationship with home improvement just now, the kind where I can't afford to remodel the bathrooms and the kitchen and thus I don't bother to dust.

[anatsuno]

Nice exercise! I should probably do that too, hmm.

[resonant]

It was interesting. Much more difficult than I expected.

[lobelia321]

11. Try doing my writing in pen instead of pencil.
This is an intriguing one. Why oh why, wondrous Res? I do the switching seats at dinner table now and again! It throws everyone!!

:-)

[resonant]

At that point I was just running out of ideas! But it is true that I have a devotion to mechanical pencils that is verging on a fetish, which suggests that changing writing implements might have some effect.