Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken. ~ Frank Herbert

Sometimes Happiness is Change

It’s been a hell of a fifteen to eighteen months. From my heart surgery, to my mother’s illness and death, to a brutal job search and a lot of stress and unhappiness at work I’ve been in a really hard place. Over that period I also lost a lot of people out of my life, it seems that in hard times you really do find out who really cares enough to be there for you. I’ve been working and hoping for a time when things would start to come together and recently, actually all in one bloody week everything came together.

In the same week, I finalized the estate documents on the house I owned that my mother had lived in, over the last eight months I accepted five different offers on the house. A couple flaked, one didn’t get approved for the park the house resides in, I rejected one ridiculous lowball offer, I accepted an offer but it had a built in two month time delay so I had to conditionally accepted it, and finally I got an offer in my price range with both park and finance approval. This past week we finalized the sale and I received both the down payment and final payment for the home.

Also, after eight months all of the requirements related to my mother’s estate have been satisfied and I was able to finalize the estate. This was a few weeks after we spread my mother’s ashes at sea off of Chatham on the coast of Cape Cod.

And while I won’t be able to start collecting yet, I filed for social security because I’ve recently turned sixty-two and am able to do that, so I locked it in, you know, just in case they decide to make changes to new applications.

Finally, I applied for a job after my boss made me incredibly mad, an interim position I really shouldn’t have applied for, the idea of jumping back into the job search again in eight or ten months and possibly ending up without insurance, after recovering from heart surgery and having a cow valve beating away in there, was not a smart risk. I applied on Monday, they contacted me on Wednesday, interviewed me the next Monday and offered to bring me to campus shortly after on Tuesday. At that point I turned down the second interview and explained my situation. They returned with, so what if we had a permanent position? Which turned into a rebuilt opportunity that I did a second interview for last week on Zoom and was offered the position this weekend. And so in one week I finalized the sale of my home, my mother’s estate and got a new job, a pretty damn good week.

The opportunity I’m embarking upon, the giant change that is now happening, is me becoming the Special Assistant for Academic Initiatives at Paul Smith’s College in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. This is a homecoming of sorts, I did my bachelors degree at SUNY Plattsburgh and those three years there and in the Adirondacks were absolutely magnificent. SUNY Plattsburgh is a really special place and I’ve carried some really amazing friends from my time there for forty years now and I’m excited to be back near some of them. Paul Smith’s is near Saranac Lake and Lake Placid, it’s a really amazing school, campus and area. The school has an environmental focus and was someplace I wanted to attend when I was a student. I’m really excited to be heading there and for the challenge of a new position.

And while this now means retiring from working in California, moving over three thousand miles, new job, new place to live, new colleagues and lots and lots and lots of smaller details, I’m excited for the change, happy for it. I’m a weirdo, that’s obvious to anyone who knows me, and one of the ways I’m weird is that I actually like change.

But this change is far more significant than the things I’ve just mentioned. It very much feels like my old life has died. My mother is gone and that ends that connection as well as that responsibility. As I mentioned I’ve lost a lot of relationships this past year and really have no one left in my life, on a personal level, on any regular basis. I am blessed to have some really long-term great friends but they’re spread all over the globe, although I will be closer to a couple soon. I’m leaving California which I love and where I have lived for over three decades. So it very much feels like I’m entering a new phase of my life and to be honest, the final phase of my life, so it’s significant. I’ve always been someone who understands the fleeting nature of life, but there’s no denying there isn’t a lot of time left and I’m determined that the last chapter will be lived for me. There are things I want to do, I want a home base, I want to build some community in my immediate geography as I live through this final stage and I want to spend more time with my nieces and nephews.

So massive change is not coming, it’s absolutely here, along with all that encompasses, fear, anxiety, excitement and unlike for most people, for me, happiness. In the midst of all of this change I’m actually happier right now than I have been in years. Here’s to the change, the madness and the next chapter as a nomad hits the road again! Happy days for me and happily for you my friends. ~ Rev Kane