The Disequilibrium of Change

It started, oddly enough, with an empty guest room. Old furniture had been distributed to kids, and now the blank walls and single remnant bed cried out for attention. A trip to the furniture store resulted in the purchase of better furnishings than our master bedroom, so we decided to move the old furniture downstairs and use the new, ourselves. In the meantime we ought to paint the master bedroom while it was empty...

You get the idea. For the past week we have been living in the guest room downstairs -- mostly, that is, since the majority of our clothes are still in the closet upstairs. Except for the clothes in our drawers that are now downstairs. Meanwhile, the painting upstairs starts today, and the new furniture arrives next week.

Then, I returned to the church Sunday afternoon for a visiting choir's concert to discover that my office computer had been stolen. In the span of two and a half hours, someone had slipped into my office, unplugged peripherals, packed the laptop in its case and made their way into oblivion. Goodbye emails. Goodbye contact list. Goodbye iTunes library. Goodbye goodness knows what all that I cannot remember. All that, plus this violated feeling of lost innocence. A lot of people have been in and out of my study -- street people, transient people, grieving people and angry people, searching people, dreaming people, ill people and working people -- but never until now have I felt like the space needed fumigating. My precious and comfortable and "homey" study suddenly feels, in inexplicable ways, foreign and dirty.

And I'm shocked -- and somewhat embarrassed -- by how dislocated and disoriented all this has left me feeling. Dislocation at home and work. I like to think of myself as pretty flexible -- rolling with the punches; enjoying adventure and change and the possibilities of whatever "new" lies ahead. Instead, I've wondered around this week as though I had suffered a blow to the head, unable to concentrate, unable to accomplish anything worthwhile, hardly recognizing where I was, looking quizzically at even the simplest questions or tasks at hand -- as though they, or I, had suddenly dropped down from Mars.

So much for flexibility, rolling with the punches, and that exuberant sense of adventure and possibility. I have a dreaded sense that this craving for the restoration of order and normalcy means I'm getting old.

Meanwhile, a new computer is on the way despite our insurance coverage's $1000 deductible, and after a few hours of tedious work with the backup files my iTunes library is roughly restored. And sleeping in the guest room really does feel like vacationing in a nice hotel -- although the housekeeping service is considerably less attentive. But parking is free, I can read my own paper instead of USA Today, and the coffee pot makes more than 4 cups. Who needs order when you have all that?