Starting over…

As someone who has left my home country and immigrated to another country, I’m often in conversation with people who are considering immigration. And one of the most popular “excuses” I hear for why someone cannot leave or why they are resistant to the idea of immigrating is, “I can’t start over”. The fear of giving up everything they had built and moving to a place they don’t know to start over from scratch, terrifies them.

And I get it. I was there too. In fact, I had ignorantly underestimated how traumatic it would be to uproot my entire life and to start again somewhere else. Now perhaps – PERHAPS – the fact that I have had to start over many, many times in my life, gave me the courage to take on the adventure of immigrating.

AND I want to point out here that there is also a false belief holding you stuck if you are scared of starting over – whether your “starting over” is immigrating to another country, or leaving a job that doesn’t fulfill you, or ending a marriage. Your kids might be fully grown and now want to leave home and start their own lives. Or you may have lost your job or lost a loved one. All these things put us in a situation where we must start over. Whatever your “starting over” looks like, be mindful of how you are looking at the situation. You see, what I’ve discovered is that people tend to think that if they have created something or reached a certain point in their life, then it’s complete. They won’t ever have to do that again.

That is simply not true. There are no guarantees in life. Even when you’ve reached the pinnacle of your career, or you are earning more money than you’ve ever earned in your life, you have no guarantees that you will stay there forever. That’s simply not the nature of life. Life keeps changing. Our circumstances change. What mattered yesterday may not matter tomorrow.

It’s like Anne Giardini says, “We find a careful balance only to discover that gravity or stasis or love or dismay or illness or some other force suddenly tows us in an unexpected direction. We wake up to find that we have changed abruptly in a way that is peculiar and inexplicable. We are constantly adjusting, making it up, feeling our way forward, figuring out how to be and where to go next…”

Life is a series of new starts. Some of them are small. Others are really big and scary. Changing jobs is a way that you might be starting over. Leaving a marriage or relationship that isn’t working, is choosing to start over. It’s declaring that you hope for new possibilities in love and commitment for yourself.

For some of us, the starting over is really dramatic. Starting over after a heart attack or stroke might be more challenging and might require a lot of work on things we didn’t think we would ever have to do again. For one of my clients for example, it involved relearning how to walk, talk, read, and write again after a stroke. So, there was the challenge of relearning things that most of us only think we will have to do once in our lives as children.

Whatever your new start is, I want to remind you that the fact that you are starting over says nothing about who you are, or how far you’ve come. It simply says you are starting something new. Unless YOU make it mean something about you. Starting over doesn’t mean you failed, or that you are a failure. There is no shame in starting over.

What’s far more important here, is the fact that you’ve done it before, which means you know how, and you can start again.

In this situation my coach would remind me that the issue is not the real issue. It’s how we relate to ourselves and to the issue that’s the real issue. I can see starting over as a declaration of my failure and inadequacy as a human being. I can make it mean something about my sense of self and my self worth. Or I can see it as an adventure, a chance to begin again and to create anew. I can see it as an invitation to be more intentional, more mindful of what I’m creating and how I’m showing up to the experience.

If I’m stuck in a victim mindset, I might see losing a job, or ending a marriage, or my kids growing up and leaving home, or starting at a lower-level job to reinvent myself and start a new career path as an indication that I don’t measure up and I can tell myself that “these bad things are happening TO me”.

However, if I take full ownership of my life, I can see these things as opportunities that are happening FOR me. They are new adventures to learn and grow and to create what I want. And if I’m honest with myself, I would also appreciate the fact that I can never predict where life will take me. Just because I’ve reached a certain level of success, doesn’t mean that I will always stay there.

Life is always in flow. Everything has it’s time. The seasons remind us of that. It reminds us that there is a time for new beginnings, to start over with a clean slate or to begin again. There is a time for growth and abundance. Then sometimes there is a time for slowing down, savouring, contemplating, rethinking. And there is a time for death, closure, completion, being done with something, and letting go.

None of these times are either good or bad; they are simply the flow of life. When I’m mindful of that, I can keep the bigger perspective. When Winter comes around, I will be mindful that Spring will come again, and that when things end, it lays the ground for new things to emerge. And when I’m in the full splendour of Summer, I can be mindful that there will come a time when this too shall end, and perhaps in being mindful about that, I get to savour what is good, beautiful, and joyful, in full knowing that there will come a time when I won’t have the things and experiences I’m having now.

Starting over can be painful and joyful. Starting over is like planting the seeds in anticipation of what will blossom and grow when Spring and Summer comes around. It’s an expression of deep hope about what’s possible. And there are always opportunities to start over. It could be small, like having a conversation after a disagreement or fallout. Or it could be really big, like recovering from a stroke or immigrating to another country. Either way, you get to decide what you want to focus your attention on. Will you focus on what you’ve lost, or will you focus on what you get to create?