“It didn’t change my life…” is an unequivocal marker. The film wasn’t great, the food didn’t awaken taste buds, the date’s not going to lead to another. “It changed my life…” sounds more dramatic and can draw an audience. Life-changing events can be pivotal: a tragedy from which there is no way back or a discovery that opens up new horizons. As most lives are held by scarcely shifting tectonic plates moving on course to the final ravine, both make for interesting listening.
But those who expect something seismic may be disappointed. “It changed my life…” may be a cliché of the hyperbolic order, an attention-gainer. What comes next can be a story of some interest, but illustrates something more like a gear change than a move into a wheelchair. It’s a matter of relativity. The before and after of an event may register as earth-shattering for someone, but others hear it as nothing to write home about.
Some examples from my life may illustrate this better. In the first year of our first house, my wife and I developed rigor mortis of the shoulders. The winter of that year was severe and the house had stood unoccupied for some time before we moved in; whatever warmth had once been generated there had gone and even with a fireplace in action we moved miserably through the icy rooms. Had we not visited an exhibition, Design for Living, we might have given birth to stiff-shouldered children. But as we moved around the stands where home improvements were displayed, the sight of what looked like pink candyfloss took our attention.
Aerolite, a brand of thermal heating, changed our lives. Rolls and rolls of the pink stuff arrived at our house and were taken up into the roof and laid across its entirety. The twin perils of the operation, putting a foot through the ceiling boards or turning myself into a pincushion of glass fibres were negotiated by skilful footwork on the spars, wearing a onesie and gloves. The result was a house which did not lose its heat to the dusty space above, a less-shivery couple and the beginnings of a home.
That was nearly four decades ago. Interestingly, another experience a year or two prior to that also claimed the words “life-changing”. As I was walking up a street on the edge of the CBD, a sign in the garden of a semi-detached Victorian house advertised it as a restaurant. Never had I imagined that a home could be such: restaurants lay within the domain of hotels, malls and other business premises. That a house could serve meals in its rooms intrigued me so much that I made a booking for my girlfriend, who was to become my wife, and I.
That evening changed my life. No, I neither proposed nor became a chef, but I did taste food for the first time. Taste buds which had been held captive by years of boarding-school food, colonial cooking and army grub were released. Flavours, textures and aromas were met and embraced. That food could be so exciting and creative was a revelation. Out there lay goods with the potential to provide boundless sensory pleasure, if one knew how and what to cook.
These two discoveries changed the quality of my life, more than its course. This is not insignificant. Think about how a dishwasher could reduce a chronic source of friction within a marriage: instead of fighting about who’s going to wash up all the dishes, both are now more than happy to pack or unpack the dishwasher. Hearing one of them say, “It changed our lives.” may seem a pure moment of bathos, but then you never heard those fights.
A machine or some equipment may change more than the quality of a life. There are a few who, having sat in and then driven a very fast supercar, leave with a determination to make money enough to experience it every time they open their garage. The route to this goal will move that life in a different direction from what was imagined: that car may one day be delivered, but with some baggage – illicit activities, broken relationships and hardened hearts. Less extreme would be the person who, having had an experience of scuba diving, is so overcome by this new and unimaginable world that she changes career totally and moves her life underwater,. In both cases, a latent desire has been awakened, with seismic effect.
There are those from whom these words will not be heard. “You’ve still gotta look good through the Covid-Craziness” is the lead line from a practice advertising facial surgery, once known as plastic. Someone who has had a face lifted, chin augmented or fat transferred will not tell of it: she or he hopes it will speak for itself. The aim was, after all, not to change the face but the life. Nor will the person who has embraced hair extensions advertise how it has increased her confidence, attracted more people and changed her life.
But some moments which change the course of a life are never spoken of. A person who is raped, particularly at a vulnerable age, may never reveal that experience though it has lived and still lives with her. A couple who give birth to a Down Syndrome child may not talk of how they felt when the hopes and dreams they may have had about their child’s future were shattered and what lay before them seemed insurmountable. That their lives would be radically changed was a fact that must have engendered feelings of despair and, perhaps, anger, but to have given vent to this unconstrainedly may have only reinforced them, making it all the more difficult to accept the truth and move forward. Similarly, the man who sits in a wheelchair because, when he was young and lived for the beach and its freedoms, he dived into an unclear pool, knows that to dwell on his loss only makes his life worse.
Change is inevitable: COVID has brought this home, to every home. But change is not a constant entirely independent of ourselves, like gravity. It lives within us through the power we have to choose. It is the exercise of choice which brings the couple with the Down Syndrome child to know that, instead of their lives and marriage being blighted by the unforeseen setback, they grew in empathy and love in a way they could not have foreseen. They had the choice whether their lives would change for the better or the worse, a choice which needed to be practised again and again over the course their lives. Change is always with us, but so is the choice of how to manage it.
