preparation Archives - Julianne Harvey

In the song “This Ain’t Goodbye” by Train, there’s a lyric that brings me to tears. Every time he sings, “Another bridge to take on the way to letting go” I think about how hard it is to release my grip when I want something to stay the same.

But as we all know, life means change. Stages and seasons and growth and pain and learning to let go, over and over and over again. I really kind of hate this. You’d think we’d get better at this as we age, but some things give me a lump at the base of my throat, and keep me awake at night, and cause me to cry when I least expect them to.

One of those things is my youngest child graduating from high school. William has his school dinner/dance this weekend, and his commencement ceremony in a few weeks. This is a big bridge to take. When Ava graduated three years ago, I thought to myself, “William is only in grade nine. There’s lots of time left with a kid at home.”

And now the day is almost here. It’s a time to celebrate all that he’s achieved, and how bright his future looks ahead of him, but as the mom and dad, it’s also a time to grieve the end of his childhood. I’m really feeling the truth of the saying, “When raising children, the days are long but the years are short.”

With all of these significant life transitions (or another bridge to take on the way to letting go), I do my best to prepare emotionally ahead of time. I really do. But there’s anticipation, and then there’s experience. The two are never the same thing, which is another thing I hate because I have no choice but to walk through it when the time comes. Advance preparation only gets me so far, and then the only way out is ever through.

Another one of these bridges I had to take this month was when Ava decided to fly to New York City on her own and stay in a shared-room hostel near Central Park. We suggested she go with a friend, but after our family Europe adventure last summer she wanted to try a solo trip. In theory, I thought this was a fabulous idea, and very brave when you are only twenty-one. In reality, I worried about her until she arrived home safely—feet sore from walking the city at all hours and full to the brim with excitement and stories and joy from managing everything on her own.

These are important foundational experiences for our children to undertake. They have to learn that the world is a big place and they can be smart and travel safely within it. But for the parents, this involves a lot of letting go. Of being there when our kids need us, but not taking over every arrangement so they have their own chance to lead and to shine. It’s exciting. And hard. It requires us to give up some semblance of control, and to lean into trusting our grown kids.

I’m taking a lot of bridges right now, with both of my kids, and I’m slowly (so slowly!) learning to let go of them. Like so many parents, I’m proud, and I’m sad, and I’m a bit lost, and I’m celebrating at exactly the same time. We never stop learning how to adjust to these changing seasons.

Happy graduation weekend to you, William! Congratulations, and we love you.

Change is a process. We can’t see it clearly peering into the future, but when we look back it’s easier to plot the high and low points on our individual graph.

I’ve come to recognize that the groundwork for change gets laid days, weeks, months and years ahead of the actual shift that we can point to and identify. Extreme patience is required in the preparation stage. It’s the seeds, deep underground, beginning to grow but nowhere near ready to burst through the soil and make themselves visible.

So much of this life is preparing. We must wait, whether we like it or not, until the time is right for the longed-for change to take place. As humans, we are wired to become bored and discontent when our existence becomes too predictable and safe. We crave adventure, change, new scenery and experiences. It’s in our DNA.

But between the desire and the reality there is a gap. Sometimes it’s short and other times it’s dishearteningly long. Most of us would not make big changes unless we first felt motivated by boredom or loss or an inner compulsion to inject fresh vitality back into our lives. It’s easy for inertia to set in, to lull us into complacency, but when the spark ignites for something new, we begin to stir up our excitement and then we usually have to wait.

I’m trying to change the way I view this preparatory period. I know that work is happening, deep in my soul, just as surely as flowers bloom out of buried seeds and not by accident. We’ve been painting our house and boy, oh boy, painting is mostly prep work. And the preparation doesn’t look like much, but without it you’d never get to those beautifully altered, crisp and clean walls.

Change is a long, messy, unpredictable process. You get great news and you’ll be flying high, then a rejection or a disappointment hits and you feel abject despair, all of that inspirational hope erased like a whiteboard. Life is a series of hurdles. Some you clear with room to spare and you are filled to the brim with success and optimism. Others you smack into and fall hard, occasionally breaking a bone or bruising your confidence, and you have no choice but to muster the courage to stand up and try for the next one.

Preparation is critical to implement change at some point in the future. We wait, we dream, we continue to work even when the odds are stacked against us. It’s better to believe that those seeds are, in fact, growing, even if we can’t see them. We show up, day after day, learning what we can and refusing to give up on what we long for most. And one day, perhaps when we least expect it, all of that prep work will turn into actual change, just in time to start the process over again with something else.

Showing all posts tagged preparation

Another Bridge to Take

Preparing for Change