Change Is a Given. Growth and Learning Are Optional.
If you don't think so, put a banana in your purse for a week!
“In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” Eric Hoffer
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus, also said, in much-quoted quote: “You cannot step into the same river twice.” Even the river, flowing by as it always is, is in a constant state of change. At the same time, there’s something we call a “river” which we see as the same river over time. It changes, yet we see it as the same.
Our selves are similar. The self that was in our childhood– that self is not the same as the self you experience now. The river, and our self, both are in constant change. AND there is some kind of stability that is there through that change.
That insistence of our minds of making the river – or our self – into something with stability points to something that is true of all living systems. Living systems seek what scientists call “homeostatis” – literally, a “same-state.” Every living system is made up of parts, and the individual parts are necessarily in relationship to each other. And the parts and relationships among them are constantly changing, subtly or more dramatically. At the same time, the parts and relationships strive, always, to preserve some sense of stability or continuity, some organizing principle: stability within change. As living systems, we live in a constant state of change – and seek within that change to find stability.
The idea that everything is constantly changing, which was the point Heraclitus was trying to make, is something our minds cannot always deal with. We see and sense stability. Stability is our usual experience.
Years ago, I studied with Gerry Weinberg, a computer software guru, change expert, and teacher of systems thinking. He liked to tell the story of how, when he decided to become a scientist, he wanted a law named for HIM. He was not so happy to discover there was already a Weinberg’s law of twins. It has something to do with what percentage of births result in twins. One day Gerry Weinberg was riding on a city bus when a woman boarded with six, yes six, children. She asked the driver how much the fare would be, and he said that children 5 and under were free. She paid her own fare, started to find a seat, and the driver challenged her. Six children under 5? Yes, she replied, there are two who are one, two who are two and a half, and the other two are four. Ah, twins! The driver said. So you have twins every time.
No, she replied. Most of the time, nothing happens.
And so Gerry Weinberg’s Law of Twins goes like that: Most of the time, nothing happens. Or so we perceive. Most of the time, we’re unconscious of whatever small changes are all around us. We make our way in that world pretty well. Our lives seem pretty stable, most of the time. That’s one reason we notice major change when it does happen.
There are, after all, a lot of pluses to stability.
When our lives are stable, when a group we’re in is stable, there’s an ease, a flow, for us, a smoothness. We get work done. There’s a sense of predictability, orderliness, certainty, clarity. In groups that are stable, we have a sense of familiarity – we know what’s going to happen. We experience peace, and calm. We live with some annoyances and irritations, because, well, we know them. That’s stability. And that’s wonderful.
Just after I studied systems and change with Jerry Weinberg, I was at a 90-minute presentation about how to introduce change in organizations. When it came time for questions, one woman’s hand shot up. “I like things the way they are,” she said. “Why do we always have to be introducing change?” Her voice had a kind of longing to it.
The speaker responded. “Put a banana in your purse for a week.”
Then he went on to the next question. The woman looked puzzled, and I admit that I had no idea in that moment what he meant. (I think I was also put off by his gruff tone that I interpreted as rudeness.) It took me about a week to figure it out.
So, what did he mean by that? “Put a banana in your purse for a week.” If it’s obvious to you, congratulations. I’m imagining there are others who need a minute to think this through. What happens to a banana in your purse … for a week? … Ah …….
Why do we always have to be dealing with change? Because all living things, by their nature, ARE changing. Even nonliving things like rivers change. A banana, if it is not growing … well, the picture’s not pretty.
We usually love the sense of stability – ease and flow, predictability, familiarity, clarity … and then something big happens to challenge our sense of stability.
Sometimes, it might be self-generated: we start to want more, or something different. What we are now is no longer enough. It’s built into us to want to explore, seek more, see variety.
Sometimes, there are what I call adaptive challenges – the simple fact that any living system is changing. For example, a congregation cannot keep going for another 50 years exactly as it is now, with the same people, acting the same way. Children grow up and graduate from Sunday School or its equivalent, and move on to other adventures in college, work, family. All of us age, and parts of our bodies, our physical system, will fail. Living systems change, and we must adapt.
And third, there are external challenges. The economy tanks or soars. Terrorists attack and we start taking different precautions. Hurricanes hit. A loved one dies, or moves away, or falls out of love with us. A staff person leaves and a new person comes in.
Sometimes it’s something big, like a pandemic, which disrupts us. Naively at the beginning, we thought for a month, maybe a few months. We made both socially-generated and self-generated changes to adapt. Then there was a new stability to our changed lives. It’s been hard for many to figure out how much to go back or go forward or stay right where we now are, and we’re not all in the same place. That means that our communities have changed, just from the mixture of reactions to how to change our lives.
Climate change means almost imperceptible changes in our lives, and so we adapt little — until we notice that the weather is significantly more severe, and our home floods or is blown away.
In any stable system, challenges from inside or out, natural or not, make the stability no longer so stable. When stability fails, we no longer feel so positive about that stability.
The philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote, “In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”
At times of challenge, stability shifts from feeling easy and smooth and peaceful. We may begin to experience stability as boring or dull, uninspiring, stifling and confining, as we want to grow and learn and experiment. A stable system will, in the face of inside and outside change, become dysfunctional. If we can’t adapt to the challenges, if we are in denial, a stable system will no longer feel like skating on smooth ice. More like walking through molasses. A living system which does not respond to the challenges, and tries to simply stay as it is, may grind to a halt or even rot and die.
Fortunately, we as human beings are designed for change, conscious change, and to plan a future. Yes, we’re also designed to deal with what’s in the present. About 90% or more of the human brain is, like that of our animal relatives, designed to process what’s in the present. With some conditioning, that 90% of the brain can respond to a stimulus in the present and make a change. But we as humans have a well-developed additional part of our brain, the neocortex, which most animals either don’t have or it’s not as developed as it is in humans. The neocortex can understand not just what is, but can imagine what is possible. As human beings, we can plan, anticipating a future and deciding what to do. As one writer says, we know how to build a bridge even as we’re walking on it. We can design a future as we move into it. We can learn from what’s happening, not just be conditioned by it.
The paradox of life is: we resist change, we seek not to change, yet the world outside and we ourselves inside are changing. In words attributed to Charles Darwin, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
To evolve, and not become extinct – as species, as individuals – we need to adapt to change by changing ourselves and our world. Or, like a banana left for a week, we rot, and don’t thrive. We are equipped to change, even if sometimes we don’t do so, and organizations and people fail.
Not all change or growth is healthy. Cancer is unhealthy change which doesn’t respect the identity of cells, the boundaries of cells. Cancer disrupts the relationships between cells. Trying not to change usually leads to unhealthy change instead — rotting, like a banana, or fossilizing, like a prehistoric life form, are actually change, just not very healthy for a living system.
Those in Ethical Societies respect the founder of the Ethical Movement, Felix Adler, but Adler would not have wanted us to reproduce exactly the movement of 1876. That would be stable only in the sense of being inert -- fossilized, changed in a different way. As Adler wrote, “We cannot adopt the way of living that was satisfactory a hundred years ago. The world in which we live has changed, and we must change with it.”
Healthy growth and change keep a stable authentic identity and respect boundaries, keep connections strong, while adapting to the world that is ever changing.
Change is a given – as are the tendencies to seek stability. The challenge is to respond to change with learning and growth, not passive fossilization or passive or active resistance. Learning and growth are optional.
When we decide to make changes to respond to challenges, it can be a very exciting time. A time of learning and growth can be dynamic, full of energy. We are meeting goals, experiencing a sense of movement. Working with others, we get a sense of collegiality. A time of conscious change can be full of joy!
So what’s the downside of a time of change?
Change can be confusing, exhausting, frustrating. We may experience a sense of loss – the stability we left behind – and fear of the uncertain future and the stories in our head about what terrible things might happen. Fear brings up the typical fight, flight, freeze, or fawn reactions. In times of change, we’ll often find ourselves in a state of friction, or even anger. Or we may just want to run away. Organizations can experience divisiveness, and even fall apart.
And so, we quite naturally seek to stop the discomfort, and look for stability. Either we seek a new stability, and some time to rest and enjoy that before facing new internal and external challenges. Or we try to get back the old stability.
Remember Weinberg’s law: “Most of the time, nothing happens.” Times of change, especially if there are lots of changes, can be very uncomfortable for living creatures and systems that tend to seek stability.
And so, we move not between stability and change, change and stability. Instead, we move from stability to discomfort with stability and from there to change. We move from change to discomfort with change and from there to stability.
So … when we are experiencing the discomfort of change, and move back to the old stability, what happens? We end up running in exactly the same circle, over and over. Well, not exactly the same – because the old familiarity isn’t quite as wonderful as it once was, because we already know it’s not working well.
Life isn’t really ever like a circle – stability to discomfort to change to discomfort to the same stability … and eventually the same change. No, life is more like a spiral, where we may go in that circle but it keeps moving – change, again, is always there, even in trying to find stability again.
Or, we are like the banana, thinking we can be stable, when that is impossible.
So, when the old stability begins to fail, as it always will, just because time passes and we age and other stuff happens in the world -- when that old stability begins to fail, we might as well accept that we can’t really go back, that in seeking a new stability, it will be just that – a different stability.
At the same time, it’d also worth remembering that change itself will be challenging and bring some discomfort, so changing for the sake of change – without a challenge worth changing for – is also not the best option. Change can be exhilarating when it is successful, and then sometimes we seek that “high” with change just because our brains have learned it feels good. If we take on more change than we can handle, we likely will find ourselves fighting it or running from it before it can really be effective. Or facing strong resistance.
If we could just deal with all that by ourselves, each individual, it would be difficult enough. When we are in an organization – at work, in your family, at your congregation – different people are at different places on the change/stability spiral, and that makes for complex and often conflictual dynamics. Some people are experiencing the peace of stability, some are experiencing the discomfort of challenges to that stability, some are likely already throwing themselves into change, and some are probably already reacting to change.
Add to that, different people have different tolerances for change and stability. There has been some interesting research that shows that there are differences in how people handle change and stability: there’s a temperament that is drawn more to stability – those people tend to be more easily frustrated and stress-prone. Biologically, those reactions are built into all our system to help protect us against harm and threat, help us keep steady. We all need those reactions – and some may have them triggered more easily than others do.
On the other side, some people just tend to experience more positive moods, are more sensitive to rewards, tend to seek out what is different. Biologically, those reactions are also built into our system. They help us explore our environment, discover possibilities, actively approach other people and resources. We all need those factors – and some may have more of those than others do.
Life may make a difference, too. A chaotic early childhood has lifetime implications that take a lot to overcome. And a lot of people are in more freethinking congregations to heal from childhood trauma or chaos. There’s some hint that those with the personality traits that seek stability over change more likely come from either chaotic or rigid homes. Not enough stability – or not enough change. Too much chaotic change or rigidity can make it harder to handle change or stability.
There are also some age differences. I found this research interesting: our openness to new experiences tends, on average, to peak at age 30. In our 30s and 40s, we tend to be solidifying our lives. But … here’s a surprise … after about age 60, again on the average, openness to new experience tends to increase again. Not to the point it was when we were 30, but nevertheless, a 70 year old may be better able to deal with change than a 50 year old, may be more able to tolerate the discomfort of change. (Other individual differences also affect those toleration levels, remember.) That makes sense – as we get to be 60 and over, we usually have a lot more change in our live to deal with.
And there’s a lot of difference depending on life circumstances. Stressful times in our personal lives may mean we look for stability in other parts of our lives. In a stressful time in society, we may tend to seek stability in our personal lives.
Some people at any given moment may prefer stability, some at the same moment prefer change. It might be temperament, it might be that we can take change only in some parts of our lives and need stability in others, it might be how we’re dealing with our childhoods, it might be our life cycle, it might be just where or who we are.
So here’s the challenge – for an individual, for any group. What’s needing to stay stable, what’s needing to change? Your temperament, age, experience, may shade your answers – so listening to the needs of others is important. If there’s no listening to each other, ironically, the group will change anyway, because some in it won’t find it functional, and in today’s world, that means they’ll likely be leaving.
Here, being in a healthy progressive congregation may help. We value education in the broad sense: we have chosen to learn and adapt in the face of the reality that change is a universal. We’re religious in our particular sense: inventing or adapting traditions and practices that help us hold on to authentic identity and build authentic relationships.
At its core, education inspires people to change and helps people gain the tools to learn from change. At the core, whatever the beliefs or nonbeliefs, a progressive religious movement is there to inspire us to learn and change, help us find the courage to face change, while providing comfort and support in getting through change. We become educators to one another, helping each other learn and grow, adapt to change. There’s an old saying that the purpose of religion is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. We need both in times of change: let the comfortable know that the times are changing, and we need to adapt or become fossils or rotten bananas – and comfort and support those who have more trouble dealing with change.
Change can be called “progress” when we learn and adapt – that is healthy growth. Alfred North Whitehead said, “The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.” And it is an art, not a science.
Because we seek homeostatis, stability, as living systems, we can’t tolerate everything changing at once. And fortunately, most of the time, not much seems to change. We can hold on to that which is not changing and needs not change – while adapting and learning to meet what is changing and needs to change or will inevitably change.
In the words of the poet James Baldwin:
For nothing is fixed,
forever and forever and forever,
it is not fixed;
the earth is always shifting,
the light is always changing,
the sea does not cease to grind down rock.
Generations do not cease to be born,
and we are responsible to them
because we are the only witnesses they have.
The sea rises, the light fails,
lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us.
The moment we cease to hold each other,
the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
Change is a given. Growth and learning are optional. As we grow and learn and adapt, may we always remember to hold each other.
Images by 1239652, photosforyou, annca, and Christoph Schütz from Pixabay