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Resistance. I’m good at it, starting with early childhood training. My mother and I followed my father to Canada when I was twelve and I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to leave my friends, my town, my school opportunity (I had to say ‘no’ to a scholarship to the Dundee High School), anything, not even Scottish weather. Dragged to Canada against my will, I was resentful. Suddenly, I was in much harsher weather (both heat and cold – a continental climate), a high school that had fourteen-year-olds in my grade (I was only twelve – the downside of changing countries), and, as my family regrouped after two years of separation, a house of tension, something I hadn’t anticipated, but perhaps I should have.

I carried that resentment for a long time. The one good thing was that I had no social life, no friends, nothing to do except study. So I did. I got good grades and I got a scholarship to college, which enabled me to come into my own. College opened my world, gave me a wider world, friends, a social life that came out of the fact that the age difference between twelve and fourteen is huge, but the age difference between sixteen and eighteen or between twenty and twenty-two is less dramatic and I no longer had an age barrier to cross.

Which shifts the word “change” from “wanting to stay as I was” to “wanting to embrace something new.” Resistance was my childhood. Desire for something else led me to adulthood.

Change isn’t the issue. It’s resistance vs. desire for something else. Attitude about what comes next. Change is merely the vehicle.