Fear of loss is greater than the hope of gain.

This single phrase dominated a huge chunk of my youth. You see, I was a military brat, and, as the daughter of a fighter pilot, we moved A LOT. I would be lying if I said it was easy. Being the forever new kid is a special challenge, one that was always precipitated by tears.

It just seemed like, every time we would get settled, make a few friends, find our place in the community, off we’d go…into the wild blue yonder. On to the next new home.

Change is scary. Change is uncomfortable. Change is hard.

When something is working, it goes against our good nature to rock the boat and seek out something new.

Even when something isn’t quite working, but we’ve done it so long that, if nothing else, it feels comfortable, we fear losing that stability.

Fear of loss is greater than the hope of gain.

Every time my dad would get orders for the next assignment he would start reminding us of this one simple phrase. The idea, of course, is that yes we are losing what we know….but oh the possibilities!

What will the next place have in store for us? How can we grow as humans in a new environment? What challenges will we get to conquer?

My dad, the Jedi mind master that he was, always turned our sadness of leaving into the most powerful emotion there is—hope.

And now, as we embark on our seventh kidding season as a licensed dairy, Matthew and I are clinging to the hope of gain in a big way.

How easy it would be to keep plodding along the way we have been. Our barns (which are really just carports) work. Our feeders work. Our manure management and sacrifice pasture work. Everything “works,” emphasis on the air quotes. They are cobbled together in a way that is just biding time until the next big break. Like most first-generation farms, we solve problems for the short term—too cheap, too small.

It’s the difference between surviving and thriving. And I don’t know about you, but I was not put on this Earth just to take up space and exist. I want to grow…evolve…live long and prosper.

Matthew and I know that this farm is capable of thriving in a big way. Every process we have in place can be upgraded to take less time and, over the life of our business, less money. It was a big leap to let go of something that was “working” but now that we’ve made it, we’re all in.

This season we started our own Industrial Revolution and started working with steel and concrete and my oh my it’s been a game changer. Solving a problem with steel feels like solving a problem for the apocalypse (which I probably take into consideration more than I should).

So even though I still catch myself thinking about how full our bank account would be if we hadn’t invested literally everything we had (and even some that we don’t) into the growth of this business I mostly find that dread being smothered by the hope of how beautifully clean and efficient our new spaces are going to be.

The hope that realizing more efficiency, and building for forever, keeps the cost of our product low enough that our cheese is a viable option for many in the grocery store.

The hope that using less time for repairs frees up our construction skills to start building more habitats that allow our goats to live in a way that calls to their own wild desires.

The hope that we, the little fish, can swim in a very big pond without sacrificing our commitment to this land and our animals.

Is it scary? You bet it’s scary.

But once you make that leap in your brain…the leap that propels you to stop worrying about the fear of loss and instead starts you hoping about what you might gain…once you get comfortable with being uncomfortable…suddenly life starts to get a whole lot less scary and a whole lot more exciting.