🌇 External change

The Book of TREE 1.48

When dealing with life’s unpleasantness
you can often flip it,
you can usually gamify it,
but sometimes
an internal change is not enough.

You don’t flip your attitude
to fix a broken leg.
You go to hospital.

You don’t gamify
an abusive relationship.
You get out.

Twice in our life together Christine and I have experienced devastating wreckage of our lives. Things were so broken we couldn’t rebuild where we were.

For us, the thing to do was start fresh somewhere new. Obviously you take yourself wherever you go, but the new location provided a landscape where we could do the necessary work of recovering and moving into what was next. In 2000 we moved from Tucson, Arizona to Conwy, North Wales. In 2022 we moved from Conwy to Dursley in South West England.

Sometimes you need to need to get help.
Sometimes you need to leave.
Sometimes you need to fight for change.

I’m honestly not very good at knowing when
it’s time to move from interior to exterior.
I tend towards external passivity
while working overtime on myself.
So I’m asking:
How do you know when it’s time to stop
changing yourself and start
changing the situation?

According to Stats for Spotify, DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ is my no.1 artist. I agree with this. I mostly listen to music while I work and her music helps me be super productive. I listened to her latest album last week. It’s going to be my new favourite, I think. I recommend listening to the full two hours. If you don’t have that kind of time right now, give this six minutes. (Probably because of this song’s title, I was thinking over the weekend about a very different song by Joy Division.)

Grow slowly
Jeff