Coping With Changes

When my husband and I made the decision to move to Auckland, he had a telephone conversation with his dad. That was the first time when dad learnt that his son was going to give up a 20 year career to pursue a different career for a life change. Prior to this happening, just about everyone else in our life had learnt about our decision and gave us their sincere blessings. However, we didn’t receive blessings from his dad. Basically he believed that hubby was doing great in his career and we were living a good life by all standards (well, I mean, by his standards). To risk financial loss and give up an already successful career for something called ‘passion‘, according to him, was irrational and crazy.

While life moves on and both hubby and I knew that we didn’t need approval from anyone in order to live our life, that bit of disappointment didn’t seem to have been reconciled. Hubby hopes that one day when he achieves his dream his dad would feel proud of him again. You see, we care about what our loved one thinks about us.

Not only hubby launched a big change in his life, I’ve had some changes too, to a lesser degree. Not only my career gives me a different perspective, there have been some subtle changes friendship-wise. A few months ago I decided to quit my favourite website where I was actively involved for about two years for another website for reasons I did not need to justify, like everything else I choose to do in my life, my friendship with the website host somehow suffered (for a little while). While I did not feel sorry for my change in life, I did feel sad that people don’t always give you their blessings when you decide to change. They like the old you to keep them at their comfort zone. To them, if everything has been working all right, why change? They don’t seem to comprehend why you need the change, just like hubby’s dad didn’t understand why we needed the change. Our change somehow caused some threats in him because that’s not what he would do if he was in our position. Therefore he was unable to give us his true blessings.

Recently I decided to make another change, which was to quit the website where I was actively involved in the last three months, again for reasons I did not need to justify. As you might have guessed, my friendship with this website host seemed no longer the same, perhaps for similar reasons in the above two examples. It goes to show that people don’t always give you blessings to pursue your dream. Some of them give you blessings only when you are being a person to their liking and suit their lifestyle, so to speak.

I know, this is not a perfect world. In this imperfect world, hubby still loves his father, and I still love the two friends who I once built a special bond with on the web. I would always be indebted to them for the inspiration I gained from the involvements I had with their websites. However, one must do what one needs to do. After all, I want to live my life.