A thing I've learned about change - change in a meaningfully positive direction, I mean - is just how long it takes to happen.
We can wait years for a certain vision to come to fruition, for a situation to shift or for a bad habit to lose its grip... and then suddenly, as if out of the blue, it changes.
With the advantage of hindsight these breakthroughs look non-linear: they require a lot of small, incremental improvements, back slides and failed experiments before anything really happens.
There are good reasons for this: systems by their nature default to stability - and multiple factors all play a part in reinforcing a current situation. You see this everywhere: from climate change to daily habits of diet or exercise.
How often have I felt desperate to change a situation yet keep reinforcing the same things as if by accident?
We’re used to doing things a certain way - compensating for things that aren’t quite in alignment, then forming habits around those compensations, until eventually we’re all out of whack. Like a bad posture or tennis stroke, our fixes work together to reinforce the undesirable situation.
But isn’t it annoying? Don’t you wake up and wish you could just grab the universe in your open fist and mould it into shape like, say, Elon Musk or any of those other weird titans?
How elusive the directive will seems be!
Instead of running our lives like visionary generals, most of us experience ourselves like messy democracies with ever shifting coalition governments, a menagerie of different voices and desires.
This doesn’t fit easily with our expectations. It can be frustrating and dispiriting, and can lead to much anxiety. It can even defeat us. And then things will explode, and change in unpredictable ways without us being ready.
But somewhere we have control. Where is it?
If I was ever asked to write a manual for life, the simplest possible thing I could come up with is this:
Relax until ready to receive instructions
Implement and go back to 1/
I’ve been dropping plumb lines into the depths of my errant will for decades, and as far as I can fathom control exists in one direction only: the act of calming down my nervous system until I am ready to receive impulses from beyond my current thinking - which is always caught in some kind of a time-bound loop, executing on previously received, now redundant ideas.
This gambit - the act of staying open to new ideas and approaches - is the one trick hardest to pull off whilst in motion, reacting to the myriad provocations and pressures of life. Not only is it the essence of all creative and sporting excellence, it is the only thing that keeps anyone from becoming a machine continually printing out the same ticker tape day after endless day.
You might argue that even that degree of control is questionable given that one can’t decide to decide anything, let alone to relax (Robert Sapolsky’s new book Determined is a fun articulation of this). But I am not sure control exists anywhere else.
When we are able to combine the capability of relaxing with an innocent and steadfast commitment to acting on clarity, we can achieve amazing things.
Which brings me back to time…
The more I understand how long change takes - and the limits to my own free will - the simpler it all gets. I start to comprehend the reality of things and what it takes to work the grain of life’s wood slowly rather than relentlessly lathe it in the wrong direction and get a hand full of splinters.
Then I can work to create the right conditions: pick up my tools with tired hands, make steady progress and celebrate small gains, while every now and then making courageous one-off decisions.
Sometimes I even imagine this slow movement of change as an intergenerational endeavour. I’ll take this as far as I can, then hand on to the next lot (whoever they are). This idea was first implanted in my head by the Chinese parable of the Foolish Old Man Who Moved the Mountains, and it’s one I think of a lot as I get older.
Grasping the slowness of change may not make us Masters of the Universe, but it can make us less stressed, more effective and generally nicer to be around.
Eventually we might even feel happy.
www.laurenceshorter.com
I'm with you on this Laurence. Everything has gotten a lot better since I stopped rushing on a 1-2 year horizon and started working to a much longer 20 year horizon. When I can have faith in the long horizon I can orient my day to day to that whilst giving over a lot more of the form and detail to God/Life.