On Change, pt. 3

Surprise! Change comes! Expect it! 

This includes expecting forgetfulness and inertia from self and others. We have limitations and tendencies as humans, and networks of humans. Without support, we can lose perspective, our anchoring in ourselves, or our agility. Acknowledging this, we can then create systems to help us meet the changing world well. 

Whether these systems are simple rituals or elaborate protocols, it’s helpful for them to:

• let us see ourselves and our surroundings more clearly. 

• support our own adaptation and resilience.

• help build collective intelligence and wisdom, tending our connections and ties as we bring each other along.

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We choose practices that let us see ourselves and our surroundings more clearly. 

Denying the weather is other than it is means I’ll adapt my clothing choices to a fantasy and be unprepared to actually walk outside. If I spend a bunch of energy denying and complaining about the weather in the process, then I’ll already be drained before I’m out the door, and I’ll have less capacity to navigate whatever I find out there. Only by accepting that I’m working with forces beyond my control and getting present enough to gather accurate information about the situation can I dress appropriately and conserve my stress tolerance so more of it is available throughout my day. Sustaining through and adapting to change requires we figure out how to meet the wider world and get honest about who we are in it. Again and again and again.

Learning about what kinds of patterns we should be looking for, as well as what they mean, can help us get perspective from the middle of things. Virginia Satir’s change model, Berkana Institute’s Two Loops model, and even the rhythms of season change in different parts of the world can be supportive of accurate sense-making when we’re trying to get a read on ourselves or a system. Slowing down to move through a structured OODA Loop – to observe, then orient, then decide (and maybe design), then act – can help us become more deliberate and avoid missing key information we would skip over if we were just reacting to our first impressions. Reflecting and making connections to others’ reflections can help us refine our understanding of things. We can, and hopefully welcome the chance to, learn and adjust as we iterate. 

Often, people assume that they’re in the moment and consciously deciding what to do next, but that’s not true as often as we would like to believe. Daniel Gilbert and Matthew Killingsworth published “A Wandering Mind Is An Unhappy Mind” in 2010, making waves for concluding that many people are only present and paying attention half of the time; the rest of the time they’re essentially moving on autopilot. With the current widespread interest in what large language models are teaching us about intelligence and in the social effects of the powerful recommendation algorithms built into ubiquitous apps, Gilbert and Killingsworth’s concern is now being shared by educators, engineers, parents, medical professionals, artists, social scientists, and community workers. There can be benefits to routinizing things, to tying our shoes, washing the dishes, packing our lunch, etc. without having to really think about each step of the process. At the same time, commuting on autopilot can mean being less prepared to adapt to a detour, and accepting a career path or taking on a social group’s patterns passively can mean spending decades living someone else’s dream. 

We can only deliberately address what we can notice and accept as real enough to need addressing. Sherry Turkle wrote in her memoir, “The expected is invisible. To see your own culture, you have to make the ‘natural’ unfamiliar.” This means that on top of the challenge of figuring out how to bring awareness and attention to being here now, with openness to whatever that means, we additionally have the challenge of figuring out how to uncover moments in which we would assume we’re making intentional choices but are actually not. 

So how to loosen our expectations and unsettle ourselves? We can explore literature and storytelling from other times and places. We can put our stories next to histories of those who came before us or are living different lives than us right now. We can pause for reflective writing and other introspection practices. We can wonder, can cultivate curiosity. Walking or driving a different route to a familiar place, getting lost, watching a movie in a language you don’t speak…these can all be helpful small adventures. Dedicating time to attention practices, like a dérive or bird watching, can be refreshing. And with organizations like the Strother School hosting attention sanctuaries for practicing in groups, you can ever more easily find others to practice with. You can play new games, find an improv group, volunteer to welcome and onboard new folks for an organization that’s become familiar to you. You can listen to children. Once the feeling of being in unfamiliar territory becomes something we welcome rather than something we resist, it becomes easier to recognize invitations to return to beginner’s mind all around us. And once we’re in that space of not-knowing, we can sometimes more easily recognize what’s real. 

Questions for discernment during a pause:

What do I want? And what do I really want? And what do I really actually want?

What am I afraid to consider or admit? What if I accepted it?

What am I afraid will happen? Imagine the worst happens…then what?

What patterns and factors might I not see? Where am I not looking?

What parts of any of these answers are my child self trying to get something they needed or wanted and couldn’t get in the past? What parts of these answers are true for the more experienced and powerful self I am now?

What would my 20-years-from-now self advise current me to focus on in this moment? 

We support our own adaptation and resilience.

Growing up around farm animals and with adults who encouraged deepening our connections to the living world around us, I remember being cautioned regularly to treat every creature like it was wild, regardless of how domesticated and affectionate it seemed when conditions were ideal. A scared horse will rear. A startled dog will bite. A hungry bear will break into the trash bins. This isn’t because any of these creatures are bad or mean, we kids were taught. It’s not personal or their whole personalities. They’re just stressed and trying to survive. Whatever our relationships and however they would act when their needs are met and nervous systems regulated, they’re also emotional, irrational beings. Just like us. 

Like all other creatures, humans have a tendency to become more reactive and less discerning when under different kinds of stress. This is true of others, of course, and also ourselves. Given all change, welcome and unwelcome, involves some discomfort and unsettling, all change involves some amount of stress. Sustainability through change depends in part, then, on our practices for managing, living with, and living beyond our stressors.

“I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.”

― Ta-Nehisi Coates

So what does this look like? When discussing anxiety with the hosts of the “Women at Work” podcast, clinical psychologist and behavioral scientist Michelle Drapkin suggests understanding yourself as a pot of water that’s always on a little bit of heat. In this metaphor, avoiding boiling over depends on staying aware of both how much heat there already is and how different actions will increase or decrease it. If checking social media before bed leads to trouble sleeping, which leads to feeling gloomy, sleepy, and irritable the next day, I can avoid turning the heat up on myself in that way by designing a scrolling-free bedtime routine for myself and allocating a specific 20 minutes to get my fix of Twitter earlier in the day. If trying to pick clothes and pack lunch for the day each morning adds time pressure to my mornings that causes me to feel rushed and frustrated while trying to commute to work, I can practice picking clothes and packing my lunch the night before. My coworker always carries a bag snack. My roommate taps phone-wallet-keys before stepping out. My friend has a bedroom chalkboard and takes time on Sunday nights to write up a few goals for the week. Identifying movable stressors in our worlds and experimenting with designing routine changes to address them can make a huge difference in the emotional experience and capacity we have day-to-day. 

Sometimes the changes we need to make aren’t about our physical environment; sometimes our mental habits of judging, comparing, or fixating on fixing are draining and dysregulating us. Sometimes we reenact patterns from childhood that don’t serve us in our current contexts and relationships. Sometimes we confuse our emotional story about now for both the truth about now and the truth for all time, forgetting that many beings navigated challenging times before us and that the decades and centuries ahead of our species will be full of other stories. Mindfulness, journaling, exploring self-integration frameworks like Internal Family Systems and Polyvegal theory, listening to elders, and playing with sci-fi of both the dystopian and utopian varieties can help us develop new patterns and bring more ease to our relationships with our minds. 

Beyond giving attention to addressing and understanding sources of stress in our lives, we can nurture ourselves and build our capacity to remember we’re more than our struggles by dedicating time to practices that help us feel wonder. Oceans, mountains, kittens, and videos of slime mold solving mazes can inspire awe at all we get to witness in being alive. There’s pleasure in singing, hugging a loved one, slowly drinking a cup of tea. We have friends and ancestors and inventions and stars to be grateful for. To focus on suffering all the time is to risk losing sight of what we’re inspired by and struggling to keep living for. Celebrations, appreciation, and wildly hopeful daydreams can bring us respite and an anchoring that helps carry us through other disorienting or painful experiences. We have to remember we’re more than our current struggles and to find ways to rest in the middle of things.

We help build collective intelligence and wisdom, tending our connections and ties as we bring each other along.

For all the incredible creativity and adaptability of humans, all we’re capable of, we’re pretty fragile and helpless in isolation. We’re most adept and most fulfilled when we surrender to our interdependence. Not that we can survive at all without the earth providing for the fundamentals of life our bodies need, but what we can move and create alone is nothing compared to what we can move and create working with others. If you’ve ever helped move a friend into or out of a walk-up apartment, or been the friend receiving the help moving, you already understand very clearly what I mean here. If you’ve played a team sport like soccer, where different roles require different skills, and you got to be part of a diverse team that coordinates well, you also understand.

We also work with others from a distance. Traditions, technologies, ideas, and institutions from previous generations give us models to tinker with, whether we build on or against them. Stories and perspectives from other places can hold clues about how to understand a situation that is familiar elsewhere but novel where we are. Art can remind us that our fresh experiences of wonder and heartbreak have ancient universal echoes. Family histories, and considering what we want future generations to be able to say about us, can help us find our courage and discern our values. It’s pretty great that each new child doesn’t have to create writing, shoes, and guitars from scratch in order to benefit from them. It was helpful to be able to hear from folks in China and Italy from my apartment in New York City during February and March of 2020. However appealingly simple it is to mythologize individual heroes, working in partnerships building on the work of others allows us to build much more complex and interesting things, and to do so faster.

And as significant as it is that connections and good relationships increase our ability to impact the world around us, that we’re more effective as groups than individuals when we move wisely, we’re also just better when we’re not lonely. Our health is better when we spend time with friends. Our anxiety and stress can be soothed when we feel understood and witnessed. Having a sense of belonging and significance in a group strengthens our resilience and contributes to our ability to feel satisfied with our lives. Creating and sustaining good relationships matters, not just philosophically and strategically, but also for our physical and mental health.

Social as we are and fundamental as relationships are, it isn’t always clear what connecting with others and contributing to a collective involves. How, then, can we learn to be with each other in more generous and generative ways? We can slow down and practice listening to understand. We can offer concern for each other’s life and growth, after Erich Fromm’s definition of love, appreciate the lessons in our differences, and look for common ground. We can clarify, together, our expectations, boundaries, hopes, and needs when we’re collaborating across seasons and in different roles. We can model owning and learning from our mistakes, giving credit, asking for help, checking our reactivity, and even bowing out gracefully when it’s time. We can practice patience. We can offer each other care and gratitude. We can work to accompany each other, trusting that everyone has something to offer as part of a team. 

There are many tools and frameworks for community-building and collaborating well, maybe more than for any of the other skill sets touched on in this piece. Kelly Hayes, Grace Lee Boggs, and many others have gifted us written reflections on how to build and tend to communities. The Full Spectrum Leadership model and others like it help us appreciate the roles different team members’ differing values can play in contributing to the well-being of the whole. The Gottman institute has guides for nurturing trust and for compassionately navigating conflict. The Liberating Structures menu offers activities for helping groups cohere and unearth their collective brilliance. We have many resources and many models available to us, once we decide relationships and connection matter enough for us to prioritize them. 

It’s challenging to steadily change with a changing system, and even more challenging to steward an organization – a complex and living system in its own right – through upsetting and transformation-inciting times. But that adaptation is the constant work of being alive, both a burden and a fleeting gift. Many, many people have figured out seemingly impossible ways forward before us, and now it’s our turn. If we move well and take some good notes, hopefully someday our stories will be added to the lists of those new generations learn from, are comforted by, and find inspiration in. 

As Octavia Butler wrote in 2000, “There’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems…There are thousands of answers – at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”