Small change
Change in the world
Eight years ago I went back home to Greece, after spending two years in New York. I was in my tiny room in NYC checking out every news outlet I could think of when Barack Obama was elected, and scrolling down this new thing called Facebook.
A few months later, in that same room, I kept hitting refresh on my laptop to see news from Athens — already burdened and burdened and burning in the midst of riots following the murder of a fifteen-year-old year old boy by a cop. During orchestra rehearsal break at NYU, where I still considered myself a musician, we all stood in front of the lounge TVs of NYU and watched the collapse of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch.
I went to New York looking for change and change found me — for better or worse. I went back home no longer a musician, and the Greek debt crisis arrived, seemingly out of nowhere, right as I left a bleeding NYC. It is rather bizarre how we remember global events by the rooms we occupied while they unfolded — who we were with, what we were doing, how our private lives brushed against history.
2. Change within
There’s change that happens in the world around you, and there’s change that happens to you. The two don’t always align.
The latter creeps in slowly, while you try to take one step at a time, pushing away doubts and insecurities, and, ultimately, fear, of an unfamiliar environment. It lurks at the back of your mind when you cling to newborn hopes years in a barren reality. It blindsides you on a Friday afternoon when ideas and plans for the weekend fall through because you don’t know the city you live in yet.
3. The ordinary and the foreign
Even when you move to another country, even when you stop speaking your mother tongue every day, change doesn’t announce itself in the big differences between your home country and your new surrounding nor in important events happening around you. It hides in the minor, the mundane: the coins you can’t tell apart at the cafe counter, the unfamiliar brands in the grocery aisle, the instinct to look the wrong way before crossing the street.
4. The weight of small things
It found me in the handful of pennies — the 10p’s and 5p’s — scattered on the ground when my wallet grew too heavy to hole them, because I’d been avoiding using them. After all, who wants to hold up a queue fumbling with coins? It crept up into my bed instead of my white cat, my lovely gentle giant, one night when I woke up sure he had just climbed beside me as he had for the past six years. It tutted when, after two months as a guest, I stepped again on that particular spot on the floor that creaks in the night, hoping I hadn’t woken my friends. And then I cringe again, remembering my own place, the one I knew like the back of my hand, recalling the finest details I loved about my beautiful, my desolate home.
5. The cost of leaving
When the plane took off two months ago, I felt liberated. When it landed in London, the thought of ever having to move back home felt suffocating. It was the first time in seventeen years that my fear of flights didn’t appear.
But there is always a downside to a hopeful step forward: you cannot take it without a sense of loss, without dichotomising your soul. That loss in the people who drift away —slowly or all at once— and in those little, unimportant daily rituals that you cannot take with you. There is that period between the old and the new that feels like limbo, that involves a certain loss of self and a reinvention of oneself.
6. In the small shifts
I haven’t had nearly as many cigarette cravings as I did in Greece, where everyone smokes everywhere, but I have worried sick about my loved ones back home —and made them worry sick about me. I’ve been jogging outside quite often, but my mood still swings. Reading more, but concentrating less. Sleeping better, but dreaming more vividly.
The new beginning you’re going for doesn’t arrive all at once. It takes time and often feels like a void that will either consume you or you’ll somehow manage to fill in with both equal parts excitement and fear — and all those things your new reality has to offer, good or bad. And still I know, not being able to tell a few coins apart is a small price to pay for a new beginning.
