Change is Hard.
Whether acquiring a new habit or discarding an old one, we sometimes learn to hack our own behavior. Choosing to release someone from our lives or to reconcile with them after forgiveness, changing jobs because we worked in a harmful workplace,training for a demanding adventure are all changes that are hard. Or learning something new. Or saying, “I was wrong.” Change requires courage and a hope of something better to come. It requires humility and curiosity.
Before-and-After
How often do you click on those ubiquitous before-and-after images? Whether photos of a home renovation, someone’s body and their old jeans, a kids’ playroom transformed from joyful chaos to even more joyful organization, a muddy plot turned into a gorgeous garden, short haircut suggestions for women over 50?
I confess that the dopamine hit I get from the before-and-after apartmenttherapy.com photos is enough to keep me from unsubscribing from their emails even though I don’t live in an apartment and even though I have no plans to renovate any part of my house. I just love transformations.
While these photos don’t show the work, time, money, arguments, or frailty of creating or maintaining the “after,” they do remind us that change, even massive change, is possible. (This is how advertisers sell their products after all.)
Change is a Process
But what if we consider transformation as a process that can honor both the stories we tell about ourselves as we are right now and can help us dream and consider what is possible? That is, right now, your life is the way it is and you are the way you are. And you have lived a whole life beginning in a primordial soup, have been shaped by the things and people around you. Some of these have been good, and some of them have been hard, and you are what you are because of all of them.
Last November’s Roses
If your life’s a garden, can you find the stems that produce the scent of the crushed thyme underfoot? Can you find living shoots of past blossoms as the days are warming up. Can you enjoy the roses from last November–brilliant and faded at the same time–climbing over rocky walls? Can you fall on your knees in the earth, noticing how the living earth that is both soft and solid, holds you with her gravity? Can you honor the spaces in your life, the dark corners, the moss of undisturbed earth, the fragile spider webs and see both the present and the possibility?
What if we consider transformation as a process that can honor both the stories we tell about ourselves as we are right now and can help us dream and consider what is possible?
Curating
And as you notice and name what you want to be different, keep those parts of yourself that are precious. And realize that everything you do to grow and change requires work and energy and light and comfort. And can you tenderly speak to yourself, saying something like, “Yes, I am this way, and I have had many days and nights, springs, summer, autumns, and winters before this one that brought me here”? And, maintaining your tenderness toward yourself–for shame has never helped anyone become a more loving, open, humble person–ask yourself, “Where do I want to be, what do I need to get there, and who can help me?” “What parts of me do I want to keep, what parts of my story make it into the highlight reel? What strengths have helped me get to where I am right now? And how can I use those to help me get to where I would like to be, where I am capable of growing?”
Just as with the enviably tidy wardrobe in the glossy magazine, we don’t throw everything away. We ask ourselves what to keep and what to discard, return to its giver, become the giver to another. And, although we fantasize about burning it all down and starting over, most of us avoid regret by resisting this urge.
Becoming
If we look at only the before-and-after, we will be either overwhelmed or disheartened or discouraged or defeated. We are works in progress. Even if we experience a cataclysmic event, a crisis, a new way of seeing, the strands of our lives stay with us, glimmering threads of those essential parts of ourselves, unique, and strong. We’ll miss the sweet opening notes of the first movement and the echoes of those notes in the later movements.
Remember, you have been criticizing yourself for years and it hasn’t worked. Try approving of yourself and see what happens.
Louise L. Hay
What about you?
As you think about where you’d like to be, what parts of yourself do you want to preserve? Not only preserve, but honor? If you experience self-loathing, how do you talk to yourself? If harshly, what happens when you talk to yourself in that way? What changes you can you celebrate as you become more of what you want to be. If you are struggling with discipline or focus, can you celebrate your quick mind and your imagination, your playfulness and also be happy, satisfied, with the fact that you are becoming more focused or intentional? What can you do to honor both sides of yourself at once? What would it make possible if you could notice and share the small wins? Who is in your front row who will notice and celebrate your progress?
Photo by S. Laiba Ali on Unsplash
