SPARE CHANGE


In a conversation with a real estate investment company president the other evening (my, but don't I just keep THE best company) he actually, in 2005 -- (some two millenia, and half a decade after whatshisname came to save my ass and seemingly nearly as long since the following phrase was first stolen from the Japanese by an American change consultant only to be gobbled up and spit out in a trillion corporate speeches over the past 30 years), [insert big breath here after that considerable aside] -- told me that:

--> "change is the only constant."

It was the absolute sense of profundity and novelty with which he used the old, horse-eaten, shat-out chesnut of a phrase that really made me want to reach out and smack him. He really thought he was saying something that few have ever heard before. (What made it worse is that he was recounting the lessons he was instilling in his children.)

Change, of course, is what makes modern society the hellish emotional, psychological home-of-Beelzebub it can be and is often for us erect homo saps (or however the latin is spelled). Stress is its other name. Progress is another. The fucking fax machine (the grandfather of all things rushed) and it's evil spawned demons (email and cell phones) are other aliases.

Not all stress/change is bad, of course. I would like the change, for example, of Stephen Harper moving from breathing to not. (But alas I fantasize into a digression, so let me return to my less-than-rich-with-clarity ramble.) For another word we give change is excitement. It's the fine line between excitement and forced slavery which needs watching, I suppose. But that's not where I'm going here today -- I'll leave the co-opting of the good-fairy aspects of change by my Bay Street pals to another blog, another day.

Moving is big change. I ain't talking switching houses across town, although move with someone who carries posessions, spatula by fork by tooth brush, to the curb and the pain of such geographical change can be evident (Hamish? Ms. Cope?). I'm really talking though about major jumps of geography. I once lived in 4 provinces (one twice) two countries and had 6 different jobs in 5 years. But even that amount of change became mundane in actual fact and no longer really constituted change as I mean to describe it here.

My mother is an immigrant and some near 60 years after coming to Canada just recently shook her head in amazement, still, at herself that she would pick up and leave her mother ("aye, and we were so close") and all she knew to come to Canada. (Although an immigrant she once famously denied it, through a misunderstanding of the meaning of the word I'm figuring, with a thick gutteral, Scot's "awwckh, Ah'm nahwt!")

I too often forget, surrounded as I am in my life with almost-Canadian citizens, near citizens and want-to-be citizens, what a major and profound decision and action it constitutes to take up residence in a truly new place. By comparison my move from Sarnia to Red Deer pales (despite the highly exotic nature of both those locales).

My mother at least had her new husband (a native of her new land), the same language (well, sort of!) and a very much, for the time certainly, shared culture and history. How much more difficult it surely must be for those that come here to a language that shares few phenomes in the mouth and looks not at all like language in the eye. Where thinking itself is composed differently, let alone cultural mores and the expected behavoural responses being quite foreign.

I'm in love with someone who wants to come to Canada (who damn well better get to Canada soon if I'm to avoid a DSB prompted explosion). I too often catch myself in discussion of his decision to emmigrate and the myriad of decisons reguired out of that, treating it as if we were talking what restaurant we might go to for lunch. I have another very good and intimate friend who is the written test away from getting his full citizenship, who has a wonderfully close relationship with his parents but must watch it erode in the face of no real and physical contact stemming from the result of the thousands upon thousands of miles that separates them due to his decision to become a Canadian. And I too often find myself thinking about his lonliness through my own filter that I can easily pick and choose to see my family whenever I want. I have another friend who is not even on the landed immigrant track (he can see his go home date on the very near horizon) who desperately wants to not return to the home of his birth but watches as opportunity after opportunity that would give him some chance to make Canada his home slip away, precisely because he's not a citizen. There's irony. And I too often try to respond to his plight in the normal course of job hunting strategies.

I don't really have a point to this blog, except I suppose, to put to words the sense of error I have in trying to be, but feeling I'm not being, as supportive and loving to my Lover and my good friends as they struggle with their individual plights with what is surely among the bravest personal changes to be undertaken -- to leave the comfort of (at least) the "known" for the possibility of "better" and "future," and in one case for, in part, me.

I've actually taken some notes on this for poetry, but since actually producing a poem these days would require writing a poem, I leave you with a photo I took of change yesterday.