The Nature of Change

I remember it as if it was yesterday. I was lying on a large, very comfortable, couch. It was late, probably around midnight. I must have been eleven years old at the time. The year was 1999, and I was still living in Texas, although my remaining time in Texas was quickly drawing to an end. I had already seen the prospectus for the English boarding school I was to enter later in the year. And I wasn’t very happy about leaving Texas. The years there had been (up to that point) the happiest in my life. I had my Nintendo, my horse riding that I did at weekends, my ranch house that took me out into the country, and our suburban house, which was Texas-style-large, it has a swimming pool with a diving board, and a waterfall. It seemed very unlikely to me that whatever came next would be as good. And I was mostly right about that.

The couch I was lying on was not one I was familiar with. We had gone around someone’s house for the evening; it was a going away party of sorts. An adult’s party, with us kids running around, doing our own thing on the side. The other kids, by this point, must have all been asleep. That’s when I heard the door open, and adults coming into the room. I closed my eyes, and listened. I heard my dad’s voice, and the voice of a random woman, one I didn’t recognise. When they saw me on the couch, they began to speak softly, and I remember the woman covering me with a blanket. They began to speak about me. The woman asked, “how I was dealing with the change.” And I was surprised when I heard my dad respond, “not well at all.” I knew I wasn’t particularly happy about the move, I obviously didn’t want to leave Texas, but I wasn’t aware at all that my unhappiness was discernible to others. It seems very strange, and obvious to me now, that it would have been discernible. Obviously, a lot was changing, and obviously I was unhappy, and obviously others would have been able to pick up on that, and yet, at the time, to eleven-year-old me, it didn’t seem obvious. And so, my ears pricked up.

The woman continued; she went on about how it must be very hard, given all that had happened, etc etc. I wasn’t very interested to hear her commentary upon things, I wanted to hear more of my dad’s thoughts. As he was speaking far more candidly than he ever did with me. Then she asked how I was getting on at school. And again, my dad said, “not well”, which again surprised me. But then, he further elaborated, and this is the part I most vividly remember. He said that I had fallen out with all my friends at school, that I didn’t talk to any of them anymore. He said I had done the same thing when I left Scotland. I fell out with all my friends there. And he said I did this to make it easier to move away. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I think to eleven-year-old me, this was the most interesting thing I had ever heard in my life. This probably represents the origins of my interest in psychology.

Okay, so why did I find it so fascinating? First, it suggested to me that people not only observe one another, but that they in turn form theories about why people are the way that they are. Which is kind of obvious, of course we human beings do this, but I don’t think it occurred to me quite so clearly as it did in that moment. Secondly, I though the idea that you could know something (or think you know something) about someone else, about their state of mind, that they themselves didn’t know, that they themselves were not even aware of, was a fascinating idea. Thirdly, it suggested, a complete divide between, why people do what they do, and the rational, the reasons that they give for doing what they do, if asked. Not because there being intentionally manipulative, not because there attempting to mislead, but because they genuinely don’t know themselves – why their state of mind, has led them to act in the way that they are. We are very often unaware of what is motivating our course of action at the most fundamental level. And as I would learn later, now that I’m studying psychology, our day-to-day decision making, and the actions we take, are rarely (if ever), based on careful consideration, or a rational process (even if we like to imagine they are). Most of the time we make a snap, impulsive or intuitive decision, which we then rationalise and make sense of after the fact.

So, although I remember lying on that couch, and listening to this adult conversation as if it happened yesterday - I remember it vividly - I don’t remember what school was like then, in these last months of being in Texas. And that’s probably no bad thing. I imagine my dad’s negative statement sums up that period well. So I probably did go out of my way to frustrate and insult my friends, and I’m sure, had I been asked, I would have been able to give some good reasons as to why they deserved it, why their foolishness, or their words, or whatever, had brought this upon them. But I, of course, would have been unaware of the truth. The truth which was that I was losing my only friends, not to another school, not to another town, but to the other side of the world, and I, in all probability, would never see any of them again. This made me feel sad, it made me feel angry, and it made me feel afraid. In other words, things were changing fast. Now, we all respond to change in different ways, and indeed how we respond to change, in one chapter of our lives, may be very different to how we respond to change in another chapter. I personally find change, now, considerably less overwhelming. But for some, change is something to be resisted, something to fight against. For some, change is so painful, that they must isolate themselves off from it; for some, change is so scary that they’d rather remain in a negative state of affairs, to avoid it. Change is a thorny business.

I have more or less set out the problem – what some, what many of us, experience as the overwhelming nature of change - and in this second part of my address, I’m going to reflect upon solutions to that problem. Not in any kind of definitive sense, of course, but in an exploratory sense. And Nature herself, it seems to me, is a big part of this puzzle. We, homo sapiens, evolved into what we are, deeply attuned to Nature, and yet at her mercy. For Nature’s essence, as I’ve said, is change. You could think of countless examples to illustrate this. Our ancestor might have discovered food on a plant in a particular area at one time, to find it all withered and inedible the next. A place of safe refuge at one time might be under threat soon thereafter. A pleasant climate may turn unbearable, plenty may turn to want, which may force a nomadic people onwards to something different, though what that would be was also an unknown. We might imagine that the only constant in all this change, is that part of us we have which is having the experiences, our sense of ‘I’. Much like a still point, and the centre of a tornado. But even that, depending on our state of consciousness, can drop away, and dissolve.

And my guess would be, although sadly I don’t have any of my primordial ancestors on hand to ask, is that for them, this sense of the ‘I’ dropping out, the centre of experience dropping out, would have been a much more ordinary kind of experience to have. Whereas today, in the modern West, our sense of ‘I’ maintaining its place within the driver’s seat, and at all times holding the light, is far more normative. It even seems as if we have intentionally structured our world to maintain, at all costs, this narrow, singular conscious state. And we have done this, by and large, by expelling ourselves from Nature. By cushioning, through innovation, Nature’s direct effect upon us. We no longer seek the plant for its food - we grow the plant for its food. We no longer go out in search of a sanctuary, we create a place of sanctuary. No climate forces us to move on, we would air condition the desert, and warm the frozen tundra. Now of course, as an aside, it appears as if Nature is in fact gearing up to smash through our artificially constructed barriers, and no doubt our hubris will launch us over the edge before we will do anything about it. We will not willingly embrace the change necessary, it will surely be forced upon us. And so, despite all I’ve said already, when it comes to maintaining the illusion of constancy in this world of ours, I have only begun to scratch the surface.

Time is another very interesting part of this puzzle. Our ancestors’ experience of time must have been acutely at odds with our own. Think, for example, of when you watch a movie. Your experience of that movie will alter your perception of time passing. If you’re bored, the movie might drag; if you’re enthralled, it may fly by. And yet, that doesn’t change the length of the movie, right? If it says on the box ‘two hours’, then you know it will last for two hours. And the odd thing is, we believe that the number on the box, which can be measured with a clock, is what is real, and our perception, our experience of that time passing, is an illusion. We elevate the so-called reality of clock time, above our own experience of time. which is a very unnatural thing for us to do. Despite it being so normative, we have only elevated clock time above experiential time for less than two centuries, since the industrial revolution. Throughout the rest of human existence, for tens of thousands of years prior, our experience is what held primacy.

And this relates to everything I was saying about our sense of ‘I’ dissolving. I said that I believe it would have been a more ordinary kind of experience, for our ancestors, for their sense of ‘I’ to dissolve, and partly I think the reasons for this comes down to their relationship to time. When one’s sense of ‘I’ dissolves, one’s perception of time is radically altered; time is perceived in some sense as illusory. And this relates, I think, to Jesus’ conception of eternal life: “he that hates his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.” Which is akin to saying that when the ‘I’ drops out of the centre, that is to experience an infinitude. That is the Kingdom of Heaven. But it is a much more difficult state for us to access today, it seems, because we have capitulated to the ticking clock. Even when we engage in spiritual practices, such as mindfulness, we invariably have half an eye open on the ticking clock, anxious that time will somehow get away from us, get the better of us, anxious that we will fail to meet the expectations of the external world. Clock time really does seem like a new, and more pernicious, manifestation of Mammon for the modern technological world.

So, in an effort to keep change at bay, we control Nature, we control time, we control money, we control people through institutions and ideologies, through social conversion, and we convince ourselves that we have a mastery upon all such external things, a control of the material world. And as such, when any of these things suddenly do spiral out of control, and revert to their natural state, we are taken aback, and panic in the face of chaos. Although it is far easier said than done, I believe that the solution lies in re-adopting our ancestors’ approach to all such things - to the Self, to Nature, to time, and to people - which is to recognise that the normative state of affairs is in fact change, and flux. We should train ourselves not to treat routine as normative, but the very opposite, a peculiar anomaly, a divergence from the natural state of things. Because that is closer to the truth.

And what is the cost for not doing as such? Well, it’s the anxiety I’ve mentioned. There’s also a ‘reaping what you sow’ component: those who seek to cushion themselves from Nature are consequently out of tune with her, unable to discern her true state, and this will carry dire consequences for us all. Those who seek to manage clock time will never have enough, they will always be racing to meet an impossible ideal. They will never know themselves, or interior things, for their eyes will always be fixed on an illusory exterior. Change need not be overwhelming, for in truth we are change within change, that is our nature. We are water, ever moving, ever flowing, ever shaping our course. And our reward for recognising such, is a radical freedom to manifest ourselves in the now, for there is no yesterday or tomorrow to which we must conform.

Amen.