Do We Really Want Change?

     When I was younger I drove a Saab. I had three of them, one from the late 1970s and two from the 1980s. They were standard, mid-sized, four-door sedans. But I liked that they were kind of quirky, and thought they somehow made me seem special -- not like the boring young suburban husband I had become. But I also liked the way they drove, the way they handled in winter weather. I liked the front-wheel drive and boxy look of the car, and the way I sat up in the driver's seat.

My Saab, in the 1980s

     But why I liked the car is irrelevant. The point is I liked the car. But finally, by the mid-1990s, I decided I needed something different. I wanted a change.

     So I looked around at all kinds of different cars. The Honda: too commonplace. The Buick: too old fashioned. The Audi: too expensive. The Ford Taurus: too suburban.

     After months of shopping, I finally bought my new car. It was a Volvo S60, a standard, mid-sized, four-door sedan. It was kind of boxy. It had front-wheel drive and I sat up high in the driver's seat. And as I drove it home that first day it dawned on me that I now had a new car ... a car that was as much like my old car as possible and still be a different car.

     So how much do we really like change?

     I was recently listening to a psychology lecture about love. The professor outlined the three most important factors that attract us romantically to another human being. The three are: proximity, similarity, and familiarity. It's a myth that opposites attract, that we fall in love with the stranger across a crowded room. We fall in love with people of similar age and socio-economic backgrounds, of similar education and cultural tastes, and with someone we probably already know.

     And I'll leave it to you to decide how much change we want in the political world. In 2008 Barack Obama campaigned and won on change. But how much change did we really get? And now in 2016, with many people wanting change, we will likely elect Hillary Clinton, who proudly boasts of not changing much at all.

     But I digress. Blogger Meryl Baer, like many retirees, decided she needed a change of scenery and embarked on an extended road trip across the country, from New Jersey south to Florida, then across to Texas. But now she has returned home, thrilled her car started and her house remained intact, and is back to her comfortable routine. She restocked the refrigerator, spent a day doing laundry, and then wrote a few final thoughts on her trip in Seven Weeks and No Longer Counting.

     Laura Lee Carter takes a different tack toward change. She talks about how she Let Go of the Familiar and Added More Adventure and Excitement to Her Life. In midlife she found new love, a new career, and then built a solar-powered home in rural Colorado. And now, with all those changes, she's happy to stay home and enjoy her new surroundings.

     Carol Cassara at Heart-Mind-Soul takes a longer view of the changes in our lives. In Back in the Day she looks at boomer life in the 1960s and 1970s, sometimes wondering where our innocence has gone. And in It's Like We Never Said Goodbye she recounts a remarkable love story, one that ended in divorce, but had a surprise ending 27 years later when past and present came together in the most unusual of ways.

     Speaking of another kind of change, Rita R. Robison, of The Survive and Thrive Boomer Guide, tells us we can call up our credit card company and ask them to change the terms. According to Robison, almost 80 percent of people who asked for a lower interest rate had their request granted, and almost 90 percent who asked to get late fees waived were successful. Despite that, very few of us try to negotiate with our credit card company. But people as consumers have more power than they think, she concludes, and the worst that can happen is that they say no.

Today I drive an Acura. So different?

      Then we have Kathy Gottberg in 4 Smart Agreements to Master an Awesome Life who tells us that all our perceptions are on shaky ground anyway, and that we are living an illusion. She cites Don Miguel Ruiz who says, "Ninety-five percent of the beliefs we have stored in our minds are nothing but lies, and we suffer because we believe all those lies.”

     So what can we do to break free of our illusions? Ruiz has four suggestions on how to rework our daily patterns and reclaim our personal power. To these Gottberg adds four of her own, which show how important it is not to become so familiar with our world that we don't even notice it anymore. Instead, we need to stay conscious, be aware and follow our own personal guidance. "Only then," she concludes, "can we change those things in our life that are ours to change."