“The only thing that is constant is change” ~ Heraclitus

2017 is drawing to a close and 2018 is rapidly approaching. It always seems like such a big transition, moving from one year to the next, but when you think about it, December 31st, 2017 and January 1st, 2018 aren’t going to be that much different. Let’s face it, 11:59pm on the 31st of December is really not much different to 12:01am on January the 1st. Rationally, the transition into 2018 holds no more meaning than the transition from November 30 to December 1, or as 3:36am quietly clicks over to 3:37am. Why does the passage of time matter so much more at the stroke of midnight? 11:57pm is probably feeling a bit irked.

Change in all other parts if our lives is a bit like the movement of the clock. Every now and then, we look to see that change has happened but it’s been happening imperceptibly all around us, the state of perpetual flux.

There are always constants – the immutable sunrise and sunset, the lunar rhythm of the full moon, the soft cycle of the seasons. It’s easy to be distracted by their comforting predictability. And yet, ironically, it is these power of these cycles that creates the constant change all around us that we fail to perceive – the winds, the rain, the tides which ever change our natural world, sculpting our land and changing our oceans over eons.

Change is constant, whether it be in our natural world, in our community, or in our body. How we approach this change is a key to living a life of joy and meaning.

It’s natural to dislike change. Our brains are essentially predictive pattern recognition engines. Our brain understands our environment by using the pattern of the world it’s already learnt to make a prediction of what it thinks will happen, and then it compares that prediction to the current inflow of information. If the brain’s prediction and the inflow of information match, the brain doesn’t need to do any more work. When the brain encounters something it didn’t predict, it has to work a lot harder to process the new information and use that information to update its internal model of the world.

I don’t like to shave, because shaving takes time, energy and resources. By not shaving, I’m being much more efficient (though some would say ‘lazy’).

Our brains are like my shaving habits. The brain would much rather not have to process any extra information because that takes time, energy and resources. By not having to process any more new information, our brains are efficient. Unlike my shaving habits, which probably are born of laziness, the brain likes to conserve energy since there’s only so much fuel the body can spare for it, and the more efficient the brains processing is, the less fuel it needs.

So by keeping things fairly constant and avoiding change, the brain can just plod along rather efficiently without all the extra resources needed if it had to process constant change.

But this puts us in a bit of a bind, since change is happening anyway whether our brains want it to or not.

It becomes the immovable force versus the irresistible object. We can dig in and resist the inevitable, or we can adapt to the change.

If we dig in, if we stay static, if we fail to adapt, then it eventually costs us more in terms of energy. It creates a greater cognitive load – maybe not in the short term, but resisting change is like padding against the current … it takes a lot of work, and it’s cognitively taxing. All that energy for no actual gain, well, we’ve talked about that before in other posts.

We can’t change ‘change’, and by trying to change ‘change’, we expend huge amounts of energy to get nowhere. And it changes nothing, except for diminished motivation, volition and resistance. The futile fighting with ‘change’ makes it hard for joy to flourish, not that it stops us trying sometimes.

John C. Maxwell wrote, “Change is inevitable, growth is optional”. You can certainly keep swimming upstream if you want to, or you can accept that change can not be changed and adapt in productive ways You can channel the energy that would have otherwise gone into resisting change and put it into something that aligns with your values and helps to enhance your life of meaning, in turn helping you to grow your joy, not unwittingly sabotage it.

If you don’t want to get stuck at 11:57pm and you want to move forward into the new year, accept the inevitability of change, and take that first step of committed action in the direction of your values.