It’s the second week of the New Year. How are your resolutions holding up? Have you already deposited veganuary in the disposal, and followed that with a wet January chaser? Or were your goals more ambitious?
That change is hard is cliche. Most big changes are not readily embraced, thus major transitions often aren’t usually welcomed. And yet so much changes in our lives. Change is constant, stasis an illusion. How do we resolve that contradiction?
Even when we initiate change, it is a difficult. Our family shift from urbanites to … not urbanites … was the culmination of a fairly painful process, mostly not of our own making other than the decision to escape from NY. Withstanding the financial crises and its effects: several failed house sales, loss of jobs, salary cuts, etc. - foamed our psychological runway, but it was a spark-producing, screeching skid nonetheless. All passengers were successfully exited, to “land spreading out so far and wide.” The baggage arrived several months later in the form of culture shock, especially for our then 12 year old, but for mom and dad too. (Example: turns out that bringing sushi for 7th grade lunch in Kinderhook was like a black man wearing a tan suit in the White House…oh my, people do talk!)
Why is change hard? Why is accepting and managing it so fraught?
Lao Tzu, perhaps the original just chill out dude, wrote a couple of hundred centuries ago:“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”
So what gives, peeps? Why can’t we just let it flow? New Yorkers generally can’t or don’t, but there’s more to it. As it turns out we may not be wired to do so. According to psychologists, familiarity doesn’t breed contempt, it breeds comfort. Homeostasis is the natural state of the body…it seeks to maintain itself in its present state. Inertia then - what is at rest stays at rest - is in our genes. (And fills out our jeans.)
But this also doesn’t square with Darwin, who noted that species which are most adaptable to change are the more successful ones. However, successful adaptation takes time, with small changes having profound, cumulative and lasting effects.
So, maybe our annual resolutions are a vaguely-conscious attempt to change the status quo of our inner selves in more digestible small bites. Our neocortex cleverly circumventing our innermost, reptilian reflexes. Reason overcoming fear. There’s plenty of science supporting the notion that new habits - which drive successful change - are formed incrementally.
There’s more to it, of course. Read more here.
The more things change…
How apropos!