Change up

Mom and I rearranged Jack’s room yesterday. I am not one of those people who can leave their furniture in the same place for years and years. It would make me crazy. I just have to rearrange a room once in a while. Mom enjoys it as much as I do, I think. I remember when I was in high school, getting the urge to rearrange my room at 11:00 at night, and trying to move all the furniture myself while managing not to wake anyone up. Rearranging a room can provide a whole morning’s entertainment… deciding which way things should go, testing a couple of options, and there’s always the cleaning, which isn’t necessarily fun, but getting to move the room around provides more than adequate incentive to clean. Standing back and looking at the room in a whole different arrangement makes me inexplicably happy. Mark and Dad think that Mom and I are nuts for wanting to go through all that effort, just to rearrange a room that was perfectly fine the way it was.

Change energizes me, and it’s hard for me to understand where people are coming from who have a hard time with change. Maybe it’s due to my army brat upbringing, where every three years or so brought a change of school, friends, state or even country. There was always the opportunity to make a fresh start- be a new person- make a great first impression. Like Anne of Green Gables says, “Tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it.” For me, each place was fresh with no mistakes in it. It’s the same when you change a room around- there are no more dust bunnies hidden under the couch and all the clothes are hung up and toys put away. This time (I say to myself) I will keep it clean. I suspect, however, that it will be the same as when I moved each time: despite my efforts to be a new and improved version of myself, I always ended up with the same old messy me.