Recycling Ourselves

"Recycling turns things into other things, which is like magic." ~ Doug Coupland

We are wired for change; we mutate and morph from infancy to old age. Our skin and cells are completely new every seven years and our taste buds are replaced every two weeks. Our bodies continually recycle themselves.

We are meant to grow and evolve into something radically different from what we once were. Why not our perspectives, opinions and beliefs as well?

When I moved to England nearly 7 years ago, I left my beloved log cabin, a dream job, my precious family, longtime friends and 40 years of life in Alaska. In my new home, I encountered a foreign culture, strange foods (like babbys yed.. you don’t want to know), a new relationship and a confusing language (I couldn’t understand the Wigan accent!). I had neither friends nor purpose. Unmoored, I was a tidal wave searching for a shore. As a result, the container for all my former beliefs about life was shattered by the impact. I sloughed off my religion and my political party and recycled myself from a silkworm into a moth.

The axiom is that life is short but I think life is long and there is time for many incarnations of self, each one curiously fresh, unique and exciting.

 A man once said that his wife had been 11 different women in the course of their marriage, and he’d loved them all.  We are changelings and shapeshifters and even now you and I are in the process of transforming into another new version of ourselves. 

May you be as heartened as I am by this encouragement from T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” one of my personal favorites:

“There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea…

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

Time to turn back and descend the stair…

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.“

Old doors recycled into art; I like to think this is a metaphor for my life.

“Often when you think you’re at the end of something, you’re at the beginning of something else.” ~Fred Rogers

Saying goodbye to my Alaskan log cabin meant saying hello to a new me and new adventures in England and Spain.