I Like Change, Just Not Like This

Welcome to Miami, where fireworks are a weekly or even daily event! These surprises keep me from losing my mind when I cannot travel.

Miami never ceases to amaze me. I cannot tell you how often I’ve been awakened late at night with a thirty-minute fireworks show outside my bedroom door. If I wanted a change from my “ho-hum” life before this, I certainly got it.

“I Like To Move It, Move It”

I like change, and I’ll be the first to admit it. Something inside me has an alarm that begins to go off around year four of living in the same place. By year five I’m almost frantic to pack and relocate to somewhere different. My spousal unit is the opposite. Changing him to a new location takes an act of will, so we never seem to move until around year eight, nine, or ten. So it’s his fault that he has to live with a maniac for five years. That wouldn’t happen if we’d just moved when I wanted.

My spousal unit tried to help me with this. We bought an old barn of a house on the beach in 2013 and renovated it. When my moving itch started again, we built on a lot, literally five houses down the street. So, in year four, we moved. And that helped—until it didn’t.

My squirmy need to move house is more than a new address. It is the change I need to grow and thrive as a human being.said it best in The Hyphen: “We’re not a fixed state — we’re moving like a meandering river at all times. Even if it’s only been a week since you’ve seen someone: they have changed in that time. Everyone you love is slightly different every time you see them.”

A meandering river. That’s me.

Something happens to me every time, approximately at year five, when I stop my internal meanderings and become cemented in place physically, mentally, and emotionally. Things seem to grind to a halt, and I’m desperate to break free.

Part of this is the “real estate gene” that my sister and I inherited from our parents, and I’m not sure which of us has moved the most. Probably me, but I haven’t counted. Yo, sister, have you counted?

I now have enough data from all these moves that show something else is happening.

Freedom

I’ve mentioned in previous posts about selling our family home and being without a place to land for almost eight months while I tried to find the ideal location for our new home in the U.S. For part of those months, we lived on a sailboat, and I wandered around the United States the rest of the time. Now that another year has passed, I can tell you that this wandering period was one of the most freeing times of my life, a close second to my first move to Turkey with only two suitcases to my name (yes, that’s a post for another day.)

That seems to be a recurring theme in my posts, novels, and short stories. My characters all search for their freedom in one way or another, and my travel posts currently are a run up to the big event. It’s made me sit back and look at everything I’ve written in the past two years. Yes, freedom is a developing theme here, but it has to do less with a home or location than it does with something internal.

For so many years, I was locked into a job, then a location, then as a serial entrepreneur with a self-imposed restriction that insisted I schedule myself to death. Were those things worth it? Yes. But it’s time for a significant change. I’ve longed for the freedom to roam at will and explore the world. I want to see other cultures, understand the differences, and broaden my mind.

I think there are a lot of us with this wish. And now, lucky me, I can finally live my dream. Want to come with me?

However—(yes, there is always a “but”)—preparations must be made to do that, and I’m in the middle of those preparations, with only a month-to-go ending in sight. Today, in the sheetrock dust with the tile saw going and the singing, laughing, and constant chatter of Spanish in the background, I’m not sure I’ll make it.

I did it again—stuck myself with this.

And this.

I’m living in the middle of this disaster, driving the contractor and his partner up the wall while they move more slowly than I want. After all, this is Miami. While it may not be an island, there is an aspect of “island time” that one has to recognize. I’ve lived in Key West and on Sullivan’s Island. I know island time when I see it.

At least the tile guy can sing.

Thankful

Thanks to my daughter and her great choices in restaurants, I get to leave this insanity for a few hours and visit places around Miami on the weekends. I get to step out into the real world and remind myself that my first-world problem is ridiculous. I have a life, a home, and a terrific family. And that ever-elusive freedom I’m searching for is just around the corner.

The above photo is from one example. The colorful chaos of Chica provided great food and a fabulous vibe. I stuffed myself silly last weekend.

Let’s Skip to the Good Parts

There is a bright side to sheetrock and tile dust. Despite all this chaos, downtime from traveling has allowed me to complete a novel and edit another. Since I have at least two or more weeks of construction chaos, I will spruce up a short story to submit to a contest my editor recommended and get ready to pitch to agents at the end of May and see if anyone bites. If not, there’s my self-publication schedule already on the calendar, and by the end of the year, I will be three novels ahead and working on the fourth and fifth.

The only remaining question to be answered is whether I should publish in an election year. If I write two different series with many books in each series, will it matter in the long term? What do you think? Will this year’s chaos impact book sales? Will we all be too worried about what happens in November?

The most important thing for me is: Do I even care? That is a resounding “no.” People will read my novels or not. I have a long bucket list of things to do and write, and I have no time to worry about such things.

It's time to put on my fabulous noise-canceling headphones and rip away on the computer. It helps with the stress of the noise, although it does not drown out the tile guy’s saw or his singing.

On the bright side, I remind myself that all this chaos is excellent preparation for Bangkok.

And to be thankful he can sing.