Hi, everyone. It's Rosie. Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Thursday. So with the pandemic,

many people I know have moved in the last couple of years and moving is stressful. You

have to spend money, uproot your belongings and uproot yourself. We land where we land

and take root again. And ultimately we learn to bounce back from all those changes that

come our way. In that spirit, today, I thought we could talk about resilience and our ability

to ground ourselves in the midst of unavoidable change.

I'd like to take you back to a time when I was moving from one city to another, a time

when I realized the essence of change and letting go. As you may know, I grew up in Los Angeles

and a while back I found myself with the opportunity to move to Portland, Oregon. I ended

up living there for a time and it was a challenging transition filled with anxiety and fear of

the unknown. My heart was saddened by memories of my old hangs, friends, and the comfort of

familiar surroundings. So one day I was walking down a busy street in my new home of Portland

surrounded by faces I didn't know and sounds that were unfamiliar. When suddenly I felt

a pang of homesickness, a longing for the familiar streets of LA. I stopped contemplating

whether I had made the right decision and in that moment I remembered a small plant

that I had brought with me from my old house. When I replanted it in a new pot in my new

city, it wilted instantly. I was worried I had damaged it during our trip and I'd already

had a very difficult time keeping it alive. But within a few weeks, it started to bloom again.

It leaves brighter and more full of life than before. I realized that like this plant,

I too was in the process of re-rooting into a new environment. Yes, it was uncomfortable

and scary, but this was my opportunity to grow, to bloom into a stronger version of myself.

Plus, if it didn't work out, I could always re-root somewhere else, right?

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