Choosing Contentment, Accepting Change

"Choose contentment. In this very moment, you can choose contentment - and in the next, and in the next, and in the next.

The changing seasons show us the absolute reliability of change. Nothing is more dependable than change. Take comfort in the changes."

From Judith Hanson Lasater's book A Year of Living Your Yoga.

A milestone birthday reached. A growing realization that my growing family has outgrown our wee, quaint dreamhouse and needs more space. A growing understanding that I want to live my next decade somewhere with trees. Choosing contentment while also taking comfort in change.

I turned forty this week. My children are growing into larger boys. Three very large boys in one very small house. The train tracks that are twenty feet behind our house are getting busier, stinkier, louder. They rattle the house, my bones, every fifteen minutes or so. They park and idle for half an hour at a time, spewing black clouds of lung-raping particulates into the air, blackening our walls. A large housing development is going in around the corner from us - 200 units. Our government representatives are admitting that the subway we were planning on isn't going through. A growing discontent with the schools that my children attend. The sinking feeling that everything is about to change. A heated, all-consuming debate in the community about the schools and how they stink but they might be better than they used to be. The fact that we can't spend ten minutes with other parents from the community without someone complaining about the school system.

The fact that my youngest is afraid of trees? That many of my kids' peers are playing "gangsta" on the playground? That they are reading books about urban blight, a young girl who rather than getting depressed every morning tiptoeing around the homeless drunk person asleep on her stoop, decides to pick up some litter and make her neighborhood less depressing? And realizing that we don't have to live like this, that we can make a choice. And realizing how hard that choice is to make. And resisting change. And trying to choose contentment in this moment and the next and the next.