The short answer:

Probably, but I’m not sure how.

The long answer:

I do not like carrying change around with me. Instead, it just accumulates in my desk drawers or on my dresser or on any other flat surface I can find. Somehow my home has managed not to overflow with coins yet. I think they must evaporate or something.

Change is basically worthless to me, simply because I don’t spend it on anything except laundry. I had a roommate in college who also never spent any change. His excuse was that he was from Europe, and he never bothered to learn the denominations of our coins. Sadly, I have no such excuse, I’m just lazy. If I’m buying something, I don’t want to spend the time or brainpower to count out coins from my pocket. The fact is that change just takes more effort than I’m willing to exert at any given time.

Alas, the same is often true for me when it comes to change, the abstract kind. It is much easier to do things in the same way that I have always done them than to do them differently. As a result, I generally don’t feel like putting in the effort to change. But lately, I’ve been thinking that I should change.

Part of the reason is that it sounds horrible if you say that you don’t like to change. People just assume that you’re an obstinate jerk. Of course, this is sort of hypocritical. Everybody says that they are all for change, but no one thinks about how they perform the same routine day after day, week after week. Somehow, we say that we should always strive for change, while at the same time we try to be consistent and honor traditions. Humans, whether we be nuns or not, are creatures of habit, and one of our habits is saying that we should change without actually doing anything about it.

I have always tried my best to be consistent, perhaps almost to a fault. As you may recall, I have a number of strange habits, and sometimes I feel that many of them I perform just to be consistent with my past self. After all, surely Past Me had a reason to make certain decisions, and if I go back on those decisions, am I not being untrue to myself? However, Present Me sometimes fails to realize that Past Me leaves all important decisions to Future Me, so that really Past Me is not to be trusted at all. (Luckily, Past Me, Present Me, and Future Me never meet; that would be impossibly tense.)

Sometimes I ask myself, where has being consistent ever gotten me, and the answer is obvious: the same place I started. I don’t need a lot of chaos in my life, so this is fine most of the time. I am perfectly happy to sit around on a lazy Saturday like today in my pajamas. But then I wonder, what am I missing out on? It would be terrible if the world was passing me by, just because I don’t feel like changing. Then I think, well then I should change, but unfortunately that doesn’t exactly tell me how. If only it were as easy as putting on pants.

Saying that you should change without doing anything about it is like having change build up in your house: it doesn’t do you any good unless you use it. Unfortunately, you can’t use change unless you decide on something on which to spend it, and that’s the decision that I need to take some time to figure out. At least I finally got around to changing my blog’s template. It’s nice to see a little color for a change.

Cheers,
-qm