I’ve always been great at fleeing. I’ll pick up right where I am, spend obscene amounts of money to get out of leases, buy plane tickets, uproot what I had assumed would be permanent roots. I am not one to stick around once I’ve outgrown a situation. I believe life is about growth, to constantly move and reveal parts of who you are and test the limits of your love and compassion and flexibility and resiliency. I think chasing permanence means chasing suffering, because you will always come up short.

We don’t move on enough. We stay and we force ourselves to stay because of reasons that are usually not our best reasons. We just make up reasons why we can’t go for the job we want or why we can’t move to the city we want to move to or why we can’t break up with someone we no longer feel connected to or why it’s too late to start over, too late to begin again, too late to recreate a life. Of course, we have responsibilities that cannot be easily abandoned, but those are not usually the things that keep us fixed in one spot. It’s our beliefs, our ideas about moving on, what it means, what is required of us.

We so often stay rooted in our misery because we are already there. We’re already covered in shit, so what does it matter? Except we forget that we are surrounded by renewal. The foundation of nature is based in renewal. Yet, why can’t we renew ourselves? Why do we decide on a life and camp out there until it’s uprooted by something beyond our control? As much as we are surrounded by change, we, as humans, are averse to it, for the most part. We want to find a plateau, a sense of security, and then we latch onto it. We latch on until our knuckles go white. We don’t let the seasons of our life change. We get stuck in one spot.

Now, this doesn’t mean that we have to physically uproot our lives, although that can be true, too. But, what about uprooting the beliefs we hold onto?

One of my favorite books is Conversations With God and then, perhaps, one of my favorite quotes from that book is this:

“Yes, the things that others think, say, or do will sometimes hurt you–until they do not anymore. What will get you from here to there most quickly is total honesty–being willing to assert, acknowledge, and declare exactly how you feel about a thing. Say your truth–kindly, but fully and completely. Live your truth, gently, but totally and consistently. Change your truth easily and quickly when your experience brings you new clarity.”

To me, this is a sense of rebirth. We are invited to continue to reassess our beliefs, our truths, and change our minds as often as we’d like. Something about that idea is lovely to me. It’s open-hearted. It says, I know what I know until I don’t know what I know anymore.

And, here’s the thing about honesty, about telling the truth. When we do this, it will usually propel us into action. We will realize that our relationship is no longer working or our job no longer fits us or any number of changes could come up. Friendships become outgrown. The life we were securely living in becomes uncomfortable. We change. We grow. We renew ourselves. We go into a rebirth.

We need to keep moving on. We need to see the next big thing in our lives. People say they want to feel satisfied, but they really don’t. We crave the next thing. This is why people set fire to their lives just to watch the flames, to give themselves something to rebuild again. We crave our resiliency more than we crave satisfaction and contentment. We crave the opportunity to be bold and brave instead of the comfort call of security. We crave moving on. We crave fresh starts. We just don’t know it. We don’t let ourselves know it. We root ourselves too thoroughly that we see no way out.

But, it’s never too late to begin again. That’s what they say and they say it because it’s true. You can always begin again. You can leave the relationship or you can rebirth the relationship. You can leave the job or you can reinvent the job. You can outgrow the friendship or you can grow with the friendship. It’s yours to create. It’s yours to grow into. Whether you physically move on or not, you can continue to move on. Because, we’re here to grow into new experiences of what it means to be alive. And, life, all around us, is growth, rebirth, reinvention. We can do that and be a part of something beautiful, or we can root ourselves and resist. Either way, it’s a choice for us to make every day.