In a Quiet Moment

I used to think of myself as someone who had mastered the art of navigating change.
I acquired this view after going through what I like to term a “spiritual transformation” a decade ago.

Hold your eye rolls. I’ll explain:

It started the day before Christmas Eve, when I had been clinging for too long to the bottom rung of a ladder leading downward into a personal hell after a particularly shattering break-up. My parents, looking for something to do that evening, suggested we go see The Pursuit of Happyness starring Will Smith. Two-thirds of the way through the movie, I found myself sobbing unabashedly in the dark theater, flayed open by the realization that if Will Smith’s character could surmount the insurmountable, could still wake up every day and look for the good in the world and in himself, so could I.

It was the first of many realizations tipped off by a flurry of coincidences and synchronicities and messages, all the many breadcrumbs dropped by a universe I had been unable to see before, that would lead me to a new Self over the next six months and continue to foment during the next few years.

Hence, change.

We’re talking change at the neural pathway level radiating out to new ideas and new awarenesses, new expressions, a new language, new ways of embracing others and myself. But also change in a larger esoteric sense. A change in the subatomic space I occupied in whatever Plan was unfolding.

And so I got comfortable with this idea: that changing oneself as a human being was possible and also necessary; so comfortable with the idea, in fact, that my ego took it on as part of my new self image and grew some flouncy, flower-filled pride around it. Positioned within this impressive botanic garden of my own making, I figured eventually everyone else would want to change, too.

It was just a matter of coming across the right teacher, the right book. A matter of learning how to meditate. A matter of vision boards and gratitude exercises. A matter of being able to see how nearly everything we come to know and believe in our lifetimes can be discarded in order to expose our real selves underneath, shiny and waiting to come forth into the light.

As a human you’re always looking for absolutes. You’re always looking for the end of truth. This is it; this is all I need to know. I can stop looking now…and so can everyone else. After remarkable stretches of profound change, we arrive at a new place of understanding about ourselves and the world and assume that’s all there is. We can rest easy, uncork the wine, put up our feet, enjoy the view.

But it doesn’t work that way. Despite our self-congratulations, change is a constant, right?

To illustrate: recently I’ve had a changing viewpoint about change, you could say.

Some change I love. When spring turns into summer. The end of a project and the anticipation of what’s next. The shifting positions of the planets and what it means for my horoscope. The genius who created a way to fast-forward through commercials. Whistleblowers.

But some change I’m less willing to navigate. I’m conflicted about it. Some change I downright loathe. Like most hand-held technology. The unwitting surrender of our civil right to privacy. The idea, practice, and growth of partisan journalism in its shrillest, ugliest, most manipulative form. Automation. Big data instead of human contradiction. Artificial intelligence. Dating via an app. The willingness to disrupt whatever exists so thoroughly and thoughtlessly, like a gleeful child knocking over a tower of blocks, that the scattered blocks are never retrieved…the resulting wounds never healed.

In other words, the kind of change that happens as a reaction to personal impotence, as a reaction to the desire to control something, knowing that in the end we control very little.

And yet my changing viewpoint is not just a summary of change gone wrong since that will always be debatable, nor is it a doomsday call. The sentimental part of me which wants to reflect softly over the past year isn’t willing to throw generous cuts of Armageddon into everyone else’s End of Days soup and sprinkle it with cynicism.

Because I don’t actually believe in an End of Days scenario. At one time I would have. But then Will Smith and The Pursuit of Happyness came along and stared me in the face.

My changing viewpoint is this:

The artifacts of societies and cultures will continue to evolve. The way we exist in the world will change even faster for younger generations than it already has for us, and there will always be people who are left behind, who lament the good days gone by, and I will probably be one of them, surrounded as I am by my teachers and books and exercises and pride. I don’t know where any of this change is actually headed, what it will look like, how we will wear it, eat it, earn from it, live in it, or love in it.

What I do know is that I am no longer a master at navigating it. I never was. I just needed, all those years ago, to attempt it in the first place and see where it led.

So if the tenacity of the human species coupled with the capacity for any one person on this earth to change themselves in truly miraculous ways, freed of the shackles of habit and entrenched responses to life—if any of this is a signpost pointing toward another, brighter possibility for all of us, then we must believe in our ability to attain it.

How we get there, the transformation required to start that journey and reach a new perspective, is an individual feat. Transformation may or may not happen to you (although beware: Will Smith has another movie out this holiday season). But it could happen to your best friend or your mother or your car mechanic. After that, everyone else is fair game. The ripple effects of change, the waves of new truth, eventually arrive on new shores.

In a time of change, in a season of reflection, in a quiet moment, be good to yourself and others. Be open. Be thoughtful.

Look around. Look for the good.

I’ll see you next year…