Learning to Flow With the Difficult Changes in Life
“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.” — Anais Nin
Life is always changing, things keep happening and sometimes for the worst, and we’re left to deal with the fall out. If you feel overwhelmed by the negative changes that occur in your life I want to offer some thoughts that might help. First of all it is important to realize that a big part of why we find change so challenging is because of how we have been taught to think about it. If we change the way we think about change we can dramatically increase our ability to cope with it.
For years I maintained a blog called Philosophy Is Not a Luxury, because I felt that our culture vastly underestimates the practical importance of thinking about how we think. This is especially true when we find ourselves overwhelmed by quickly changing events in our lives. A loved one dies, a relationship breaks up, a business fails, a job is lost, and suddenly we find ourselves in a tailspin. If someone asks us to stop and think we get impatient, we don’t need ideas, we need action. Tell me what to do! The problem is that doing more from the same thinking often takes us further in a bad direction.
We’ve been taught to think about change as bad, or at least that it is bad until proven good. As a result, we fear it and try to avoid it. And when change strikes, especially if it looks harmful, we feel desperate to take immediate action. The experience of change is unsettling. It knocks us off balance and in response, we want to right ourselves. As a result we live our lives as if we were walking a tightrope, always trying to maintain equilibrium and avoid rapid shifts. Of course we can’t manage that for long. Something always happens to knock us off balance and send us into the next panic of change.
We find it almost impossible to tolerate the insecurity of possible negative change and the challenge of change is potentially more intense today than it ever has been in human history because the circumstances of our world are changing at a faster and faster pace, and we are seemingly incapable of keeping up. The problems we face as a global society seem to be compounding so rapidly that we can’t respond adequately to one crisis before the next one arises. It sometimes feels like we are being buried under a pile of insurmountable problems.
No single solution to any one problem will change this. What needs to change is our ability to respond—our response-ability. To increase our response-ability to change we need to shift our relationship to the experience of change. We need to learn how to respond faster and more gracefully to the shifting sands of life. That means being able to uncover the unconscious assumptions that limit us so we can act differently.
To increase the rate at which we are able to change, we first need to examine our relationship to the feeling of change. We have all been conditioned to experience trepidation—ranging from anxiety to terror—whenever we encounter a new situation or circumstance. We are cautious of anything new and we tend to avoid change if we can. In order for us to keep up with the accelerating rate of change, one of the first things we need to change is the way we feel about change and to do that we need to change the way we think.
For thousands of years human beings have believed that the universe is fundamentally unchanging - a static stage upon which the drama of life plays out. In a universe like this, “change” feels “wrong.” If things are supposed to remain fixed, then any time we feel something changing, we instinctively feel fear and insecurity. Isn’t that often what happens? When things start to change, don’t you often feel uneasy with inner alarm bells ringing? Later, we might realize that the change is going to be positive, but our initial response is generally fearful. That is because we have been conditioned to fear change, but you can change that. You can learn to give change the benefit of the doubt and habitually adopt a position of waiting to see how things are going to play out. The fact is, things usually don’t turn out to be as bad as we fear, and even the most challenging changes often end up being beneficial, sometimes dramatically so, in the long run.
As an example, there was a time when I was an electrochemical engineer. I had been working at the associate level for four years and wanted to pursue a graduate degree to further my career and become a senior researcher. One afternoon, I was driving to the university where I had chosen to study and it was the last possible day to register for classes. (There was no online registration in those days.) On the way, I hit a traffic jam and didn’t make it to the registrar's office before it closed. That meant that I couldn’t take any classes that semester. It felt like a disaster, but I chose not to panic and over the next few days, I began to realize that I didn’t even like engineering. It became increasingly clear that the reason I was running to the registrar's office on literally the last day to register was because I didn’t really want to pursue a graduate degree in engineering. In fact, I didn’t want to be an engineer at all. Over the next few months, I made a dramatic choice, left engineering and pursued a career in education. What had initially looked like a disastrous turn of events revealed itself to be a blessing.
“If you do not change direction, you will end up where you are heading.” — Lao Tzu
In order to wait out the inevitable turbulence of change long enough to see clearly, we need to change our relationship to life. Life changes. Our lives can be dramatically better in the future than they are today, but only if they change. Unless you want your life to end exactly the way it is now, a healthy dose of fear of not changing is just as valuable as your fear of changing. And the better you can imagine your life becoming, the more comfortable you will be about it changing. If you believe that your life could be dramatically better, why would you want to wait?
The key to changing how you feel about change is realizing that life is supposed to change. We don’t live in a static universe. We live in a universe that grows. Look around. Everything grows. Growth is good. It doesn't always work out in the ways we want, but fundamentally it is better to grow than to stagnate. If we can learn to see ourselves as part of a growing living universe rather than a fixed and static one, our relationship to change will change.
Imagine that you are traveling in a train and it comes to a halt in the middle of the tracks. You would get uneasy and imagine that something must be wrong because the train is supposed to be moving. The experience of a universe that is supposed to be growing is similar. When we realize that everything is supposed to change and not remain eternally static, we begin to develop a more positive sensibility toward the experience of change. We won’t automatically recoil from change. Our first response to change is shifting from fear to curiosity. We want to see what is happening. We want to understand what is growing. If we learn to see change as potential opportunities rather than threats, we can navigate calmly through the turbulence of change and take advantage of its hidden potentials.
