Being Open to Change Doesn’t Mean the Old Way Was Wrong

Sometimes what keeps us from something better isn’t fear of change. It’s that what we’re already doing works well enough that we never think to look for another way.

Robyn Lee

For an entire year, I drove the same route to take my son to therapy.

The drive took about 30 minutes, and I planned around that. I knew what time I needed to get to his school and when we needed to leave so we could make it to his appointment.

It wasn’t necessarily a problem. It was just the route.

I’d done it enough times that I didn’t really think about it anymore. I’d figured out how to make it work, so I kept making it work.

Then one day, Google Maps showed me another way.

Less than 20 minutes.

Normally, I probably would have dismissed it.

The route included a busy street that I hated driving down, and that alone was usually enough for me to say, no, I’m not going that way. I didn’t want to be bothered with it. I knew my route, I was comfortable with my route, and an extra ten minutes seemed preferable to dealing with a street I didn’t like.

But for whatever reason, that day I followed Google Maps.

And the crazy thing was, the drive was beautiful.

At that time of day, the busy street I had been avoiding wasn’t bad at all. The drive was easy. We got there in less than 20 minutes, with plenty of time to spare. I wasn’t as tired or rushed, and I was happier getting there.

I remember being genuinely stunned.

I’d spent a full year taking the longer route to exactly the same place, partly because I had already decided I didn’t like one part of the alternative.

Being Open to Change Doesn’t Mean the Old Way Was Wrong 

I think that’s part of what made this experience stick with me.

My old route wasn’t bad. It got us where we needed to go every single time. If it had been awful—if I were constantly late, frustrated, or getting lost—I probably would have looked for another way much sooner.

But I had a route that worked, and I’d organized myself around it.

Eventually, I stopped looking.

I think we can do this in much bigger parts of our lives, too. We find a way of doing something that works, figure out how to manage it, and adjust our schedules, expectations, and energy around it. After a while, it becomes so familiar that it doesn’t occur to us to ask whether there’s another way.

And now I realize there was another layer to what I was doing.

I wasn’t just sticking with something familiar. I was dismissing an alternative before I really knew what the alternative would be like.

I had decided that street was busy. I hated driving down it. Therefore, that route wasn’t for me.

Except at that time of day, the experience I had already decided I didn’t want wasn’t even the experience waiting for me.

That has made me wonder how often I do this elsewhere.

How many things have I dismissed because I didn’t want to be bothered? How often have I decided something wasn’t for me because one part of it was unfamiliar, inconvenient, or simply not the way I normally did things?

Embarrassingly, probably a lot.

And now I’m wondering how much I’ve missed out on simply because something was different instead of familiar.

What if Different Isn’t the Most Important Part? 

We tend to think about resistance to change as fear. Sometimes that’s probably true, but I wasn’t afraid to take another route to therapy.

I just didn’t want to deal with that street.

There’s something almost annoyingly ordinary about that realization. There was no deep reason behind it. I liked my way. I didn’t like that way. Mine worked, so why bother?

But maybe being stuck in our ways doesn’t always feel like being stuck.

Sometimes it feels like preference.

It can sound completely reasonable in our own heads: I know what I like. I know what works for me. I’ve tried that before. I don’t want to deal with that. This is easier.

Any one of those things may be true. The problem comes when I let what I already think I know keep me from finding out what something might actually be like now.

I’ve been thinking about what would happen if I shifted my attention slightly.

Instead of focusing so quickly on what I don’t like about something different, I could ask: What might become possible if I tried it?

That doesn’t mean every new way will be better. I don’t have to decide the old way was wrong or force myself to get excited every time something changes.

It just leaves a little room for curiosity.

Because that street I didn’t want to drive down gave me ten extra minutes, a more enjoyable drive, and more energy when I arrived.

I couldn’t know that until I took it.

Being Open to Change Doesn’t Mean Changing the Destination 

There was another part of this that surprised me: I wasn’t trying to change where I was going.

My son still needed to get to the same place.

I think change can sometimes feel bigger because we imagine it as abandoning one thing for something completely different. That isn’t what happened here.

The destination stayed exactly the same. Only the route changed, and that changed my experience of getting there.

That made me wonder how often I assume that reaching a particular destination requires a particular route.

There are plenty of things we want to change in our lives. We want more time. More ease. More joy. We want things to feel less exhausting or frustrating. We want different results.

But there’s a strange paradox in wanting those things while also wanting everything we’re already doing to stay the same.

We want change in our lives, but we don’t necessarily want to change anything for that change to happen.

I can see versions of that in my own life. I want something to be easier, but I keep approaching it the same way. I want a different experience, but I don’t want to be inconvenienced by trying something unfamiliar. I want the benefit of another route while still wanting to take the road I already know.

The drive made that contradiction harder for me to ignore.

Maybe sometimes I know exactly where I want to go. The question isn’t whether I need a different destination.

Maybe I need to be more open to another way of getting there.

Maybe Openness to Change Starts With Curiosity 

I’ve always thought of being open to change as being willing to accept something different.

Now I’m wondering if something comes before acceptance: curiosity.

Not blind optimism that every change will improve my life. Not abandoning everything familiar simply because there’s another option.

Just enough curiosity to find out.

Maybe the unfamiliar route is worse and I go back to the old one. Maybe the thing I thought would be inconvenient really is inconvenient.

But maybe the busy street is beautiful at that time of day.

That’s what I couldn’t have known while I was dismissing it from the comfort of my usual route.

For a year, my old way got me exactly where I needed to go. There was nothing wrong with it, and I don’t regret taking it.

What stays with me is how easily I could have continued taking it simply because it was familiar.

I don’t know how many things I’ve missed because I’ve done some version of that in other areas of my life. Probably more than I’d like to admit.

But I do know that being more open to change may not require me to become a person who loves everything new or eagerly abandons what already works.

Maybe it starts much smaller than that.

Before I dismiss the different route, I can at least see where it goes.