Learning to Change
“Change is the only constant in life” -Heraclitus
I’ll be honest in admitting that I’ve never quite been sure whether to be utterly annoyed by this fact or it gives me an incredible amount of hope. Truth be told, things always change, and there’s an absolute bittersweet quality to this fact - in times of struggle, change is a welcome friend and in good times, change can seem a cruel reality. The dichotomy of change is that it happens whether we want it to or not; but we do actually have a choice when it comes to managing it.
Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher of the above quote, also had another worth considering:
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.
After all, let’s just start by considering ourselves at a human level and in how change manifests with a very simple tool: our breath. It’s estimated we experience around 23,000 breath cycles per day! Of course, this drastically varies by person, size and a number of other factors, but let’s just take a moment to marvel at the fact that in this startling large number, no two breaths are exactly the same. Much like the river’s constant flow, we too are in a state of constant change. Even in moments of “stillness” movement still lives and breathes.
So, back to the topic at hand. Can we ‘learn’ to change?
Well, if experience is our best teacher, these last few months have certainly proven that the answer would be a resounding YES. (Of course, whether we had much choice with regard to this change is a whole other topic!) What we usual don’t notice in this process of change is just that…the process. Any activity has what we can call three stages: 1.) the BEFORE, 2.) DURING, and 3.) the AFTER. We’re really good at catching the after (hence the well-used phrase that hindsight is 20/20). Sometimes if we’re really connected, present and focused we can tap in to the during. But the before is tricky.
This is partially because we don’t compartmentalize anything we do - and (back to the constantly flowing river image) it all becomes quite fluid. Which means an after is actually also a before; and a before is also an after. So when we’re aiming to tap into this process of processing change, one of our aims might be to focus on just letting there BE a before. Create a little more space; a moment to establish that we choose to engage in part of the cycle of our all-the-time flow. Or just sitting with the after and for a few moments, check in with how that feels.
In some ways I guess it becomes an “one after the other, all together” sort of experience. And maybe that’s the learning. A little like stepping into the river and seeing where you end up once you cross over to the other side.