For every new significant beginning, something else must end first. We know this, and yet we fight it. We fight the loss of the familiar, even when the familiar isn’t in our best interest. We crave new beginnings, then wage our own personal war against them.

Think of New Year’s resolutions. We make them because we want to change something. We try to establish a new healthy habit where there isn’t one, or break an old habit that no longer serves us. We know these are good for us – it’s why we make them in the first place. Yet statistics show that, on average, these resolutions last no more than 2 or 3 months before being abandoned.

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, an author and data scientist, said, “Familiarity may breed contempt, but perhaps it would be more truthful to say that familiarity breeds blindness.” What a fascinating perspective this raises.

I’ve often been asked whether there was a single event that caused me to seek a divorce after being married for 29 years. The short answer is no. No single experience pushed me to that decision. I’ve described it more like a slow burn spanning the last dozen years of the relationship.

Yet when I look more closely at the question, I recognize that Yudhanjaya’s statement offers new insight. I maintained a willful blindness to some very unhealthy relationship dynamics for years, and when I began to crave something different – a significant new beginning – I fought it. I questioned myself at every turn, threw more effort into the marriage for years, and became even more obsessed with ‘fixing’ my ex, who hadn’t asked to be fixed.

That my willful blindness could have been bred from familiarity opens up a whole different way of looking at my journey.

And it makes me wonder why we fight the loss of the familiar, even when we know it’s not what we need. I’ve heard that people don’t fight change; they fight having change thrust upon them by someone else. I have long agreed with that perspective, and now this new insight gives me pause.

If we want the change, it isn’t being forced upon us by anyone else. It’s our idea. It’s coming from something inside of us that recognizes that a change would be good. And yet we still fight it. We find ways of denying the truth even as we’re yearning for something different. We choose to remain blind rather than seek a new beginning.

As for my story, eventually, I decided to separate and ultimately divorce. What drove the decision? No external force had changed, yet something inside of me shifted. I reached out with the tip of a finger and pushed the first domino, knowing that I had unleashed the chain reaction that followed.

I took my blinders off.

I woke up. And it was my awakening that propelled me into a new beginning – not all at once, but one step at a time.

What new beginning are you longing for?