It seems fitting in the new year to do something new. Change, in other words.

Change can be greeted with so many emotions – excitement, trepidation, outright fear, resignation, enthusiasm.

Change is unavoidable.

It happens. It’s not negotiable.

There are changes you can’t control and changes you can.

Chimacum School Superintendent Richard Thompson shared an aha moment about change in December, which he expressed at a tense school board meeting. He said some people listen to “react” to what is being said, and then there are moments when we listen to be “proactive” about we’re actually hearing.

Reminded of that aha moment, Thompson started to outline eight steps that he plans to take to address parents’ concerns about discipline in the Chimacum School District, including creating an advisory committee and personally sitting in on discipline conferences.

That’s a positive example of how change can work and how a negative can be turned into a positive.

Problems don’t always have to remain problems.

Imagine if all of the issues facing Jefferson County today – the lack of affordable housing, concerns about smart meters, worries about the Port of Port Townsend and the future of Point Hudson, to name but a few – were dealt with in a similar fashion.

Of course, the problems will remain, and we will stay stuck in our ways if all we do is react and see the negative instead of being proactive.

A Port Townsend man whose car broke down in Chetzemoka Park right before Christmas shared recently that he was lucky that incident happened there. His battery had died, but people who saw his predicament came to his rescue and gave him a jump. Then, when he went to a local shop to have his battery replaced, the mechanics there advised him his radiator was leaking. So he had to have that repaired as well.

“What would have happened if I’d taken a long trip and my battery and radiator both had gone at the same time?” he wondered, thanking his good fortune of having back-to-back problems that he stopped to fix.

Sometimes, change happens for a reason. Problems get solved only when we realize we have them and instead of reacting, we have a moment in which we decide to do something to fix things.

And change.

So here’s to change and to more aha moments in 2018.

– Allison Arthur