30 Days Challenge Fall 2018 - Day Twenty Four: Adjusting To Change

Going from place A to place B is probably the riskiest activity a human being can undergo. By "point A" I understand "a familiar, well known place", whereas by "point B" I understand "a completely unknown, never visited before place".

I'm not kidding. Our ability to change our environments is unprecedented in the realm of earthly beings.

If you really think about it, it's amazing. All other creatures are seldom adventuring outside what we understand by "their territory", which is a certain area in which they are feeling comfortable and in which they can survive with their current skill set.

But humans, well, they can travel to places they've never been before, switching their familiar "territory" with a completely new surrounding.

It happens when you leave home, as a young adult, when you switch jobs, in another town, when you decide to become a "digital nomad", and I'm only talking about situations in which you're willingly changing contexts. Because there are also situations, much worse, and yet possible, that can lead to one's displacement without consent: war, natural disasters, and so on and so forth.

I've been in a few of these situations before, each of them with various degrees of "abruptness"... I served as a soldier back when military service was compulsory in my country (that was quite an experience), then I moved in the city where I attended college, then I became a digital nomad 10 years ago, with brief episodes in different countries and now I'm switching completely my current city.

It's been exactly 24 days since I started this new adventure, and the 30 days challenge you're reading is dedicated to this specific event.

Today I'm going to write a little bit about adjusting to change. About what makes us, humans, able to survive (and, most of the time, even thrive) to such a drastic surrounding adjustment.

First of all, there is this geographic adjustment. Knowing the places around you, the surroundings. It's like in one of those strategy games, when you are sending your troops to explore and the map is literally uncovered by their movements. Where was black, there is now known (and mapped) territory. What I find fascinating about this "uncovering" is how the places are changing their status in our internal representation. It happened to me more than once to pass by the same store, or the same coffee shop in the vicinity and "feel it" differently. It's like each time there is a different, more familiar place, and yet it's the same.

Second, it's the adjustment to people. In this specific event, I find it to be the most challenging task. When we decided to move here, we didn't have any friends (or none that we knew about, anyway). Luckily, we found a couple which was incredibly helpful to us and with whom we're starting to spend time on a regular basis. But other than these serendipitous types of connections, all you're left with is the people with whom you interact at the grocery store, or, in my case, at the coffee shop where I work. For instance, this morning I arrived very early, being literally the first customer. The barista not only recognized me, but she also raised the stake by telling me exactly what I was about to order (the same thing every day, obviously): a double espresso and tostadas with tomatoes. That was a connection event. We were not some strangers that we were seeing each other for the first time, but people who knew other person habits.

And then there is the predictability of your day to day activities. When you just arrived, there is this entropy which literally leaves everything open: you don't know where are you going to stay, how you are going to integrate (socially), how are you going to work, how are you going to spend each and every day of your life from now on. But then, as you "check" day after day after day in this new surrounding, routines are formed, familiar places and faces are starting to emerge and you get a little bit of stability.

Entropy decreases.

And life rearranges itself in a completely new shape, one that, as strange as it may seem in the beginning, it gradually starts to become recognizable.


Previous posts in the challenge:

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.


Dragos Roua


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Glad to see you are starting to feel settled :) Creativity and growth require shaking things up some would even say "creative destruction". Nice Day 24 post!

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