#119: Why even good changes feel hard.
A story about time, trust, and taking root.
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"You are getting younger... and everyone else is getting older."
The words slipped out as I watched my mother buzz around her back garden in western Pennsylvania. While her friends were settling into their rocking chairs, she was still expanding — her curiosity and energy ready to burst the confines of her small-town life like roots breaking through an old clay pot.
When Mike and I suggested she move closer to us, she took a year to consider it. Then at 68, she packed up four decades of life and started fresh.
It was brutal.
Not because it was the wrong choice — she needed a life that could keep up with her. But often even the best decisions involve a period of transition… during which many of us feel utterly lost.
My mom’s transplanting recently came to mind while watching my editor
go through her own move. They’re different ages, in different circumstances, but with same story: that queasy feeling of being pretty sure you’re exactly where you should be while simultaneously wondering what the hell you’ve done.
Since neither my mom or Leona are Libras (the zodiac of the chronically indecisive according to Leona), here’s what I’m thinking:
The discomfort of transition isn't a sign that we've chosen poorly, but evidence of our realignment.
We want these transitions to be simple math: right choice equals smooth landing. Instead, they're more like learning to walk again after a broken leg: necessary, ultimately healing, but nobody’s idea of a good time. And this realignment always takes longer than we want it to because it involves something that can’t be rushed: Us. Humans. Our emotions. The elusive feeling of being home.
Finding community is not the only aspect of transition that’s hard, but it clearly illustrates what makes it hard.
You can't force friendship any more than you can force a flower to bloom. You can create the conditions — show up, stay open, plant seeds of connection — but the actual alchemy of belonging happens on its own timeline.
This is what my mother discovered as she went about her days, diligently tending to potential connections like seedlings. She volunteered, took Zumba classes, joined a gardening group. She did everything "right," and still felt unmoored. Because just as a transplanted perennial needs time to establish itself before it flowers, we each need time to root into a new place.
We treat time like the enemy during these periods, begging it to move faster, to hurry us through the discomfort. But time isn't the active ingredient in transformation — we are. Time is just the space where the work happens. So while it's tempting to curse the neither-here-nor-there days, this is when we plant the seeds, water them daily, and pray.
Everything important is happening underground, invisible to the anxious gardener above.
I’m a year into my own community rebuilding after leaving my corporate career and beloved work family.
And even though I write about change for a living (insert eye roll at life's sense of irony), I’ve been so impatient with this transition.
My new communities feel like they are just starting to flower — monthly Zoom calls with kindred spirits scattered across continents, a group of "business hippies" in the UK who speak my language of both ambition and soul, creative collaborations through the Do Lectures community. But they don't yet have the worn-in comfort of my old relationships, the shorthand that comes from shared history.
It’s finally starting to sink in: we can't compare new soil to old roots. When we demand that new connections immediately replace old ones, we're asking saplings to provide the shade of mature trees.
(Funny how our progress metrics often say more about our fear of uncertainty than about how well we're actually doing.)
About a year after her move, my mother met Lynn and they became inseparable best friends. Not just because time passed, but because she kept showing up. She kept allowing herself to be both uncomfortable and hopeful.
Major life changes like moves and job transitions are essentially uprooting our sense of self and repotting it in different soil. How long does it take for roots to firmly grasp the new earth, to tap the ground water, to find the pockets of minerals and nutrients, to shift from surviving to thriving? As long as it takes.
The magic isn't in getting "good" at change — it's in learning to trust that today's consistency is tomorrow's garden.
To growing in new soil,
“It’s finally starting to sink in: we can't compare new soil to old roots. When we demand that new connections immediately replace old ones, we're asking saplings to provide the shade of mature trees.” - this hits the mark.
Perfect Post! Hope to see you soon.
Ann