You Movin Too Fast

A child psychologist once told me that children are often psychologically impacted by frequent moves and changes of lifestyle.

Military families have long known the trauma of uprooting their children every two to three years as their postings change and many families have evolved elaborate rituals around the move to lessen the strain.

I lived in the same house from birth until I moved away for college. Even then, I attended undergraduate and graduate school less than a mile from my parent's home.

By contrast, my children moved from Springfield, VA to Union, WV to Huntington, WV back to Springfield, and then to Ft. Lauderdale and back between 1992 and 2001. Six moves in eight years.

Our children have complained often that this period of chaos in their lives was severe and irreperable. They suffered from insecurity, from a lack of permanence that comes from never having experienced the comforting monotony of stasis.

Until recently I was not as sympathetic to their plight as I now know I should have been. Spending 22 years living in the same town had given me a strong desire for change. New faces and new places were a welcome change, not something to be feared. I looked (and look) forward to forging new relationships with persons places and things (or "nouns" as my 2nd grade teacher Mrs. Sands used to say).

Lately, however, I've begin to notice a discomfort in society. An insecurity borne of an eerily similar lack of permanence to what my children felt growing up. Nothing stays the same for very long.

You can see this in the macro and in the micro.

Watch any TV show in Fast Forward mode. No scene will stay in sharp focus for more than a few seconds. Do the same for the commercials -- they are a rapid fire montage of images and sound that bombards the soul

At the societal level, we move from fashion to fad to mania to passe in a matter of months. Today's hero is tomorrow villain. We raise up our idols only to smash them down in the public square of humiliation and scorn.

Long term means a year, and permanence means less frequent transitions. We are living the Orwellian double speak in our own lives.

The picture that came to mind the other day was of a phonograph needle on an old vinyl LP. In the opening tracks, the stylus rides gracefully along the perimeter without a mood or care. The longer it plays and the closer it approaches the middle, the shorter the time allowed to complete each revolution.

Round and round we go. The changes becoming ever more frequent and severe.

And even the change changes. Once orderly and predictable, societal change has become a helter skelter experience of staccatto disruptions brought to us in real time by cell phones, internet and wirelessly connected PDA's.

I think living in the big city is getting to me. Maybe I'll move.