Are You Scared To Start Over?

This was actually a trick question, because the answer is that everyone is afraid to start over.

Or at least the very idea creates resistance in the mind. Because the mind craves certainty above all else.

Known = “Safe”
Unknown = Potential Threat

And starting completely over – career, relocating, ending a relationship, stopping a project you’ve sunk time and money into – causes a lot of disruption in your life. Routines have to change. Old ideas and identities have to drop away while needing to create new ones; the same for relationships.

And the mind, whose number one job is to keep you alive, goes into overdrive to scan every new person, place, thing, activity, etc, for risk to your safety. It wants certainty, and yesterday.

It’s exhausting.

Would you start your life completely over? If you were 40 or older? 50?

That’s a question my wife and I had to ask ourselves in 2022, when we planned to move from our longtime home of San Francisco to a relatively unknown small town in Lynchburg, VA, without jobs, family, or an established network of friends.

It’s a long story for another time, but the short version is we knew our hearts wanted a shakeup. We created a vision board with all the details and found our match. We researched, networked a bit ahead of time, saw the potential, listened to our intuition, and then just made a leap of faith and moved.

Lynchburg gave us what we were looking for. But it also gave us something we didn’t know we needed – a complete life overhaul that stripped away nearly everything we were used to from 24+ years of life in San Francisco.

The simplified life gave us so much time and space to calm our nervous systems, discover old identities and let them go, and grow as individuals and as a couple. Which, in turn, provided us the ability to see more clearly exactly how we wanted to write the next part of this new chapter.

Would you start your life completely over again…just 3 years later?

I like the phrase, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it can sometimes rhyme”.

That is something Amy and I had to remind ourselves of when we both felt the profound calling to pack up and move to Richmond, and, in many ways, start our lives all over once more, just 3 years after the cross-country move.

While we moved to Lynchburg to follow our intuition and explore something totally new, the move to Richmond felt like coming home, a claiming of the life we dreamed of. I have a lot of connections from my time at VCU in the 90’s. We’ve visited plenty. And Richmond’s larger size means a ton of opportunities.

All that said, we are rebuilding once more. And the scaries that come up echo the SF-to-Lynchburg journey. But no two experiences are the same. Just as we are not the same two people who moved 3 years ago.

Our time in Lynchburg, and the beautiful tribe we curated there, will always hold a special place in our hearts. And our hearts are over the moon for this next chapter. The alignment is hitting on all cylinders.

What does your heart burn for, but which your mind shrinks away from?

I am using a drastic example to illustrate a point. You can start over. In ways great and small. And not only recover, but grow in ways you cannot foresee.

Take this as an invitation to dream big. The kind of dream that lights you up and kind of scares the shit out of you a little bit at the same time. (That’s the one that is truly meant for you.)

Much love,

Barton