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Key points
- Life is an ongoing process of navigating change.
- We change how we act to keep some things the same.
- We are so good at managing change that we often don’t even notice we’re doing it.
The other morning, as I was scrolling through my email inbox before breakfast, I noticed an email from a self-help guru whose subscription list I had signed up for. In this particular email, what was being offered were 14 mindset shifts which, it was suggested, will “change your life.”
I could easily think a lot more about this thing called a “mindset shift,” but, for some reason, on this particular morning, it was the "change your life" phrase I started churning over in my mind. Change my life, huh? Hmmm.
What does it mean to say something changes your life? I had no idea that email was going to pop up in my inbox that morning so I couldn’t possibly have had any clue that I would start thinking and writing about my life changing. So did that email “change my life”?
What is a life and when does it not change? Can we ever keep our lives the same? What would a non-changing life be?
There seems to be an unspoken idea here that this thing we call a “life” has a certain path or direction stretching way out into the future. Sometimes, so the story goes, things can happen to knock you off your path or spin you off in a new, different direction.
But can we have other stories? What if life is a series of “right nows”? Right now, I’m typing on my keyboard and, every now and then, sipping on the espresso I’ve made for myself. I’ve definitely got plans and ideas of what some next right-nows might be and even some right-nows I’d like to create in five or ten years’ time. But I don’t have a sense of the path from this right-now to the right-nows yet to be.
Maybe we learn more about our life’s “direction,” if we have one, by looking back not forward.
Do you have a sense that your life is unfolding in a particular way? Has your life ever changed from what you thought it was going to be? Are you still the same you you were a few chapters back in your life story?
It’s an extraordinary fact of the way we are designed that, mostly, we continue to have a sense of sameness when, actually, we are encased in a landscape that’s constantly swirling and swishing and cavorting all around us.
The actions we use, for example, to move ourselves to work from home each day are always different. Every time we drive our car along the route that we’ve travelled countless times before, we do different things with our arms and legs. We have to because the conditions are always different. There is different traffic around us, the traffic lights are a different color, or perhaps they’re not working at all, a speed camera has been set up, an accident has occurred, and so on.
Yesterday, my son had something called a “metabolic” gym session for the first time. Ping! That’s a change. It was his first ever. He’d never had one before in his whole life. By taking that session did he change his life?
On the same day, I finished work early and decided to walk home. It was the first time I’d ever done that. Ping, ping! Another life change. As far as I can recall, I’ve never, ever typed “Ping, ping!” before. Ping, ping, ping! One more change in my life.
Are you getting the idea? Life is change. But here’s the supremely ultimate, very cool twist: life changes so that life can stay the same. How remarkable and bizarre is that? The journey of life is a constant interplay of change and sameness. We navigate change to preserve sameness.
I walked home because I’ve signed up for a challenge to walk 10,000 steps a day and I wanted to make sure I achieved that goal. I’ve never participated in a challenge like that before, but I’ve been hitting that same goal now for several weeks. Same old, same old. My son turned up to his never-before-experienced gym session to keep working on his goal of improving his physique, which has been at the front of his mind for many months. Same, same, same.
All of us have particular states we consider ideal. Having the same old routine of a glass of wine with dinner really hits the spot for me. Going for a morning walk on the same path along the same river is something my wife does day after day after day. The pair of cut-throat finches have spent every night snuggled up together in the little cane basket nest hanging on the side of their cage. They never sleep anywhere else. Same, same, same.
For the most part, change is something we are so good at navigating we rarely even notice that we’re doing it. We are experts at adapting and adjusting to the change of life so that the constancy of life continues.
Sometimes, though, change can be more disruptive than we bargained for, to the extent that the constant states we cherish get knocked about. It’s during these times that we can experience turmoil, confusion, and distress.
But because we have such a powerfully strong inclination for balance, even these overly intrusive disruptions almost always get removed. Noticing all the different ways you navigate yourself through your day can be wonderfully instructive. And curiously exploring those parts of your life that remain unscathed in the grind of daily living can tell you a lot about yourself.
You don’t need to change your life. Life will change it for you. Life is change. May your life of change be just as you want it to be.
