I'm in the process of remodeling my mother's house, preparing it for sale. One of the "joys" of this task is removing old wallpaper. Now, mom hadn't paid much attention to the house in the last 10 or 20 years, so the wallpaper was very dated. I had three separate walls of paper to tackle, so I went online for advice. Basically, I learned this about wallpaper removal: It can be done, but it ain't easy.

But this blog entry isn't to share what I've learned on shortcuts to wallpaper removal. It's about what stared me in the face when I found myself ankle deep in scraps of sticky paper fragments. My walls were covered over with not one, but two layers of paper, and the papers themselves tended to flake off in layers. Warm water, a scraper, sponge . . . with these tools I began to flake off patches of paper. Some peeled off in wild and happy streaks, intact, leaving me a view of virgin wallboard beneath. Others offered up only an outer layer, exposing a prior wallpaper epoch beneath. But eventually, the bits that came up easily were gone, and I was left with the hardest to remove patches, those that required lots of steam and elbow grease.

Messy. Tiring. Occasionally rewarding but mostly a slogging sort of dull, work. Why am I writing about this? Those layers of paper yielded up a metaphor: When when one wants to make a change, it is much easier to add than to subtract! Yes, my parents had just added another layer when they wanted to change the look and feel of their living area. They hadn't removed the old. They'd simply layered on the new. Being in the throes of writing a book on change, I couldn't miss what was staring me in the face. When we try to change something, any habit, any part of ourselves that is "sticking to us like wallpaper," the challenge isn't adding the new, but peeling away the old. It is the old layers beneath that are the challenge! I'm sorry to say, it takes work to peel off those old, stuck on, layers. Elbow grease is required. There are no shortcuts.

Also, if we just layer on the new, and fail to remove the old, IT DOESN'T GO AWAY. It's still there, and of course, in times of stress it is the old habit that reasserts itself, because we've never really scraped away the old, have we? We just glossed over it. It sounds awfully pessimistic this diatribe on wallpaper and change, doesn't it, and this from a believer on proactively engaging change. So, let me also say that it is worth the trouble to examine those old layers and remove them. I value the clean surface I've revealed after my rubbing and scraping. Maybe next time I'll just tear down the walls altogether rather than opting to repaint. Who knows? What I do know is that any change that is worth making is going to take some elbow grease, and perhaps also a large dose of grace.