CHOOSING CHANGE
January 4, 2004
Noreen Kimball,
So, Happy New Year. I think it is the most hopeful thing about us, that we look at a new year and decide that we might like to invest some energy in doing it differently. In doing it—whatever it is—better.
Of course, we are literally born in, and to, change—thrust from a warm, moist, safe darkness into a hyper kinetic environment of bright lights, surgically masked faces, and a smack on the bottom. Actually, looking at our first experience of change, it should surprise no one that many of us avoid change whenever possible.
Next, we embark on a lifetime of learning and growing, a lifetime of change—we have little choice about it. Whether we are nurtured or not, guided or not, loved or not, we grow and we learn. We change and endure change and this business of change has considerable psychological impact on our human mind. To the fearful among us, change is threatening because it means that things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging, because it may cause things to get better. To the confident it is inspiring, because it offers a challenge to make things better. Our character and frame of mind determine how readily we choose change and how we react to change that’s imposed on us.
You know, I am actually a certified change agent. One of the many things I received training for in the corporate world I used to inhabit, was how to manage change in an organization. When the startup company I last worked for discovered that not only was it going to be successful, it was probably going to be large, the principal decided to ship me off to San Francisco (where else?) to learn the ways of planning, enrolling stakeholders, and coaching managers and employees through the process of change. I learned how to plan things so everyone would feel engaged and empowered and at cause with the change instead of merely at effect of it. It was great stuff. And it began, for me, a long habit of paying attention to change and how people suffer it, run from it, create it, and the like.
One thing I realized early on in my observations was that we are freer in our lives when we are able to pay attention to the patterns we have for dealing with change. Once we recognize them we can either change them or allow for them. For example, in that same company, the president and the publisher exhibited similar behavior patterns before they left on business trips. They’d bang around their offices making lots of noise and barking at people to find things they’d misplaced and just generally making pains in the…neck of themselves. I thought it was pretty funny, actually, and one day I had a conversation with one of them about it. I figured they had to have noticed their own behavior, and I was curious to hear what they’d say about it.
Our presiden laughed and said it was just common, garden-variety departure anxiety. He’d always been that way. “Jake’s worse,” he said, “the guy was a top sales manager at a national magazine for 15 years and he and his wife have a deal that when he has to go on a trip, she breakfasts early and leaves for work while he’s still in the shower. That’s one way they stay married.”
Departure anxiety? I’d never heard of it. Later, I thought of all the family vacations we’d begun sitting in our car not talking to one another for the first 50 miles or so because of lost luggage, misplaced cameras, car keys locked in the trunk and a generally frantic departure from the house. It never occurred to me that it was a syndrome. And when, to my chagrin, the upset continued after I separated from my husband and I couldn’t blame it on him any more, I had just decided it was another one of the many ways that I was crazy. The human animal it seems, can be disturbed by even the smallest changes.
Our very next trip happened to be Ferry Beach. I talked to my kids the night before, reminded them of previous trips, told them that our personal nuttiness was a known, named behavior pattern and that lots of people behaved the way we did. I told them that we were going to do our best, and cut each other some slack and, once we were actually in the car and on our way, we would stop and reward ourselves with ice cream cones. We did not immediately get better at departing, of course, but we did laugh at ourselves a lot and we appreciated the bit of comfort that we’d built into the process.
Given the complexity of life in the status quo, I think it is amazing that so many of us consider choosing to make changes to our habits, our behaviors, our life situations. I remember hearing a radio interview with Stanley Kunitz shortly after he was appointed Poet Laureate, about three years ago now. He was 96 years old and he talked about being ready for a change. I researched and found a printed version of the interview so I could share some of it with you this morning. Here’s what he said.
“This is a poem I wrote in the '70s, after I had lost several members of my family—my mother, my two older sisters—after I had lost, as well, several of my dearest friends in the arts. And it was a time when I felt I was ready for a change. I was ready to gather my strengths again and move in a new direction. And this poem came out of that, and I feel it is central to my work and my life. It's called The Layers. ‘I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face. Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: 'Live in the layers, not on the litter.' Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes.’ ”
Well, if, at 96, he’s not done with his changes, neither are we. The most common thing I hear people say when they talk about changes they’d like to make is that they’d like to do something better, be more, somehow. More graceful, more grateful, more patient, more pleasant, more careful, more carefree…and so on. Or less. Less fearful, less over-reacting, less burdened. Often the inspiration is someone they know or know of, whom they’d like to emulate. Sometimes the inspiration isn’t a person but a story. We’ve all heard stories of generosity or courage; stories that illustrate other qualities we’d like to have.
I have a friend who was much taken with the story of the glove on the train. If you’ve heard this story, it’s ok, I’ll make this version brief. A traveler is sitting in a compartment on a train somewhere in Germany. The train is ready to pull out of the station when a well-dressed, middle-aged woman boards and sits down opposite the traveler. As she composes herself and her belongings, the traveler notices that she is holding just one glove. It is made of very fine quality leather that matches her chic, exceedingly expensive shoes. At the same moment, just as the train begins to move, the woman and the traveler look out the window and see her glove’s mate lying on the ground, completely out of reach. The woman sits still for a moment and then, with an elegant shrug, she stands and raises the window of the compartment. In a fluid motion, she gracefully tosses her one glove out onto the ground to rest beside its mate, leaving a lovely, useful pair—for someone she will never see.
My friend, who is a minister, wrote about this story and she pointed out that to throw a favorite leather glove into oblivion must involve some uncertainty, some feelings of loss. In New England, she wrote, we spend a lifetime struggling not to lose our mittens. And, she wrote, we cling to our obligations, to hard work, to routine, the same way we cling to our mittens or gloves. She has been inspired by that story to try to change just a little. To try and look for the times when she might replace some of her New England responsibility with the decisive toss that will free her from the more confining gloves of her life—even the ones she loves.
I love that story too. I love the swiftness of the clear assessment and the flexibility that can recognize a disaster and yet manage to snatch some usefulness, some opportunity for generosity from the slim pickings of an annoying loss. For me, it is a story about walking around fully conscious, awake to every possibility and opportunity.
I think we rarely acknowledge how much courage change demands from us. When you walk around coffee hour this morning, you will be walking around with people who, like you and me, are all struggling with, to varying degrees, change they didn’t choose. Change for which they never received a set of directions. There will be people who planned to have children and discovered they couldn’t. People who married someone who developed a chronic illness that changed both their lives forever. There will be people sipping tea who planned to have a life of partnership only to discover that relationships can end, even when you don’t want them to. People whose jobs just went away. Or whose comfortable cushion of stock dwindled alarmingly in a matter of months leaving them vulnerable just before retirement. When the unexpected happens to us, we are challenged to go on, to go deeper into the unknown. What else can we do that works?
There is a biblical narrative I heard from Cheryl Lloyd recently when I was listening to one of her sermons. It’s a version of what happens to the Children of Israel after their Exodus from Egypt, and I never heard it recounted quite this way before. What I like is the way the story provides hope without offering any easy answers.
The Israelites had spent 400 years in slavery and at last they were free! But before they had time to experience even a moment of relief, they suddenly came upon the waters of the Red Sea. Without a boat or a bridge in sight, there was no way to get across. To make matters worse, they turned around to see Pharaoh and the Egyptians in full battle gear chasing after them.
The people cried out to Moses and Moses cried out to God. God replied, “Why are you yelling at me? Tell the Israelites to keep walking.” Keep walking? Where were they supposed to go? Straight into the water? No one moved. They were trapped. The waves were crashing down before them and the Egyptians were rushing toward them from behind.
In this version of the Bible story, one man understood what he needed to do. While everyone else was praying for a miracle, Nashon ben Amminadab decided to step into the water. Nothing happened. He continued until the water reached his neck. Nothing happened. He kept on going until the water came up to his mouth. Still nothing happened. He pushed forward until the water reached his nostrils and he was about to drown. Suddenly the sea before him parted and the Children of Israel crossed the sea as if on dry land.
They were overjoyed as they made their way to safety, but their struggles were not over. When they got to the other side, their challenge was just beginning. Before them stretched a forbidding desert with its promise of brutal heat, no shade, and no water.
So? Well, when we feel trapped or as if the path is too difficult, our first reaction is probably that there is no way out. But actually, there is always a way through any obstacle we face. We have to find the courage to take the plunge, to take not only the first step along the path but also the second and the third. We have to be willing to press on even when it seems we haven't made any progress at all, even when the water has reached our nostrils and there seems to be no point. Eventually, we will see dry land, the road that lies before us. And we walk along that road until the next challenge comes our way. Just as our neighbors and our friends do, every day.
We are always walking in mystery—we don’t know what will happen to us. So each of us lives with courage, it’s what keeps us going on through lives filled with uncertainty. Sometimes, we need to call for the courage to choose change. And sometimes, we need to ask for the courage to just stay put and endure because that is the right thing to do. The incredible challenge of life, the challenge for which we need the support of friends, family, a spiritual practice, it seems to me, is the challenge to know which path to choose.
In 1939, Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr created a prayer that became a mantra for a whole culture of people who were struggling to make critical, life-affirming change. He wrote, in an obituary: “God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
And it seems to me that while we’re praying for grace, courage, and wisdom, we might also consider praying for flexibility. For the grace to just toss the glove. The human ability to be flexible and adapt is probably as vital a quality as we could want in learning to master change without being buried by it. In our hymnal, there is a song about learning to deal with change that I love.
Learn to follow, learn to lead.
Feel the rhythm, fill the need.
Reap the harvest, plant the seed,
And let it be a dance
Everybody turn and spin.
Let your body learn to bend.
And like a willow in the wind,
Let it be a dance.
A child is born, the old must die.
A time for joy, a time to cry.
So take it as it passes by,
Let it be a dance.
We don’t know what the New Year will bring, except that it will bring change. But, if we face it with our usual courage—and some flexibility—it could be a dance.
May it be so.
