. . . . is the Father of Re-Invention

"Necessity is the Mother of Invention" is a saying we all learned as kids. But our lives are sometimes about re-inventing. Do we re-invent out of necessity? Or is re-invention like the goddess Athena, something of a strange, miraculous birth, out of the mind of the Father



What, though, is the cause or motive for the Fathering of Re-Invention? is it frustration with life? or a constant creative spark, like the pilot light on a gas stove that has to strike time and again to get the get going.

I'm asking this of myself as I look at my life and feel that I'm needing a change. Not a total change, mind you--but a change that is, possibly, a new discovery, or a revealing or a "doing something I always wanted to do."

Without children as my eyes and ears and experiences into the Future, everyday life, to me, gets a little stale. It's like the same thing, all the time. And some folks might take comfort in this sameness, but it makes me restless.

This isn't new, actually. It's always been in my nature, just as much as being somewhat depressive has always been in my nature. When I was younger, it was easy to be browbeaten, or to self-browbeat, into thinking that I was just a bad person who need to learn to "simmer down" or "settle down." And when you feel that way, it's easy to take the suggestions to get on medication because of the lack of acceptance of a boring everyday life. Yet what I feel is not a mental condition that needs correction--it's a state of nature that needs to be tended, like a garden, in order to give life color and value.

Within reinvention though are some pitfalls. People around me have often been baffled, if not outright angered by my reinvention. Reinvention, to them, represents instability or an inability to "grow up" and "take life seriously."

Yet how many business magazines and how many women's magazines show up people who've done this or that and became something totally different in their lives.

Sometimes re-invention might be a threat to others, to their views of themselves and maybe it casts a spotlight or magnifying glass on their own lives, their own distractions or their own doubts about the decisions they've made.

There are perhaps more people who doubt the decisions they've made for their lives than there are people who are comfortable with those decisions.

As I look again at re-invention, I think "what are the things I need to keep in order to make this re-invention successful?" That, right there, is a new and more mature attitude towards re-invention than I'd had in the past.

In the past, re-invention would me trashing many friendships, totally giving up and turning away from love, and even negating careers. I may have needed to totally shed those careers and loves and friends because they weren't supportive of the reinvention. But I also made the mistake of neglecting to tend the gardens of certain friendships because I simply didn't understand what was happening in my reinvention.

That's all very different now.

Over the past seven years that I've been in New England, I've had a couple of reinventions and have lost a few friends (New Jersey had more reinventions and way too many lost friends.) Some friends, though, are still there. Those are the friends that I should show, to them, that they are important to me. They are the friends who will be there whether they are one or one thousand miles away. Sure, all the social networking stuff helps with that, but I find also that old-fashioned telephone calls--as in hearing the sound of another person's voice--helps a great deal to nurturing those connections with others.

The other thing that's important is the portable job. Awhile back I reflected on the notion that women often have portable jobs that can be easily established whereever they might be. I've got something of a portable job in what I do on the Internet. I can work from pretty much anywhere, doing pretty much whatever it is that I do, because everything takes place in this little Downtown of social media.

So, I'm not even cemented to a career that can't be easily ported to another realm. My career is highly portable!

If I manage to keep and nurture my friends, and I have a portable career, does it matter that I stay in W. Mass? Can I now go on to L.A. or somewhere else just because I want to, because it looks like a cool place to be (maybe Austin, TX) or some other place for a change of scenery and people?

And right now, with SXSW coming up, I *really* am feeling the itch to jump in my car and just drive to Austin....

While re-invention might freak a lot of people out, maybe it's not a sign of instability or of mental illness, but just a state of human nature that is much better nurtured than disparaged. I find that I am happiest when I'm plotting a re-invention, than when I'm stuck in the doldurms of a job and life that feels too small.

The medium-sized fish in the small pond--the snake that has to discard an outgrown skin--the phoenix that consumes itself to rise up again...

A mythical bird that never dies, the phoenix flies far ahead to the front, always scanning the landscape and distant space. It represents our capacity for vision, for collecting sensory information about our environment and the events unfolding within it. The phoenix, with its great beauty, creates intense excitement and deathless inspiration

Honestly, the only thing that keeps me cemented here is the massive amount of toys and junk I've collected over the years. I still have to get rid of so much stuff it isn't even funny. I've been hesitating on the whole eBay thing because it feels so time-consuming, but other than chucking a lot of this stuff in the trash, eBay's really the best way to get rid of it.

There are other people who are rooted to their worlds, who love to collect things, and I'd like to pass on to them the things I've collected that don't mean all that much to me any more--all the dolls and such. Photographs, record albums, and books are the things that mean the most to me. Yet even those might be paired down at some point (not the records. Those will always be with me. no value other than to me, really...)

So, I guess that lots of the stuff I have has to go. Finally. Some I might miss, some I might not. But pieces of plastic are not like people. In the quest to re-invent, I'd rather get rid of things than get rid of people.

In the past, it was the people who went away and the things that stayed. That was definitely a case of having the wrong priorities.

The more I think of it, the more reinvention seems like a masculine thing to do. It isn't as much birthed as it is a refashioning of what has already been birthed. The need to reinvent comes from a fire, or a restlessness, not a boredom nor a necessity. Reinvention is only a necessity if the current incarnation (or vocation) is so ill-fitting or outgrown that the only way to get beyond is to totally consume/discard. And people reinvent themselves all the time, although perhaps not in the 180-degree way that I do it (I'm reminded of a friend who, after graduating nursing school, found that her choice to be a maternity nurse wasn't for her. She reinvented in her vocation and became a highly respected oncology nurse.)

For me, the challenge is to not lose friends, and to remember that what I might want to do is not totally at odds with the career that I've birthed over these past three years. I can leverage this career for another career....

To do that, however, is a matter of connections--as in networking connections. Now, I have to make sure I don't burn any of those networking bridges the same way I don't burn any of those friendship bridges.

Really hard to do when you're used to burning everything down and reconstituting from the ashes....but I think it's maturity and the cultivation of patience that might help me not burn everything....

Lots more to think about with reinvention. Lots more to think about for sure...






(pic source here)