“She did not want her old life, but she couldn’t imagine a new one.”
This is one of many quotes I saved from “Great Circle” by Maggie Shipstead, an epic novel about the lives of unconventional, adventurous women, spanning centuries.
That small sentence resonated with me on a deeply personal level. It sounds bleak, almost suicidal, at first, right? But in the context of the novel and the way I interpret it, it captures the essence of change. There is a nothingness between two lives, a space that we rarely notice, because change so often feels like it just happens to us.
And yes, there is sudden, seismic change. Loss. Loss of a loved one, loss of your health, or as it is happening to so many Ukrainians right now, loss of your home.
There is also the incremental change that we don’t notice until it presents us with a result. We wake up one morning and just know we have outgrown our relationship, our job, or the city we live in.
But there’s a third type of change, the one captured by the initial quote. The quote describes the times in our lives when our trajectories shift fundamentally, yet so slowly that we are forced to familiarize us with the blinding darkness that lies between the old and the new.