How to Deal With Change

Environment Induced Inertia

One of the most elusive features about life is that everything in it changes. Given how life manifests, it can be easy to remain guided by the illusion of constancy. To remain directed by the belief that who we are now will be who we will be tomorrow and the days to come. However, seeing life an unchanging thing misrepresents what life is. And it is worth noting that a lot of our suffering arises from being guided by this misrepresentation.

When you look at a mirror, what do you see? Do you feel an inkling of suspicion that the person you see is different from the person who stood before the mirror five years ago? And do you suspect that the person who will stand in the mirror five years from now will be different from the person who stands now before the mirror?

We might think recognizing the illusion of life's unchangingness would be the springboard that spurs us into engaging activities towards living a desired kind of life. Far from it. More often than not the very idea of change leaves us yearning for the opposite of change: Greying lines from our scalp inspires an urge to reach for a bottle of hair dye; creeping wrinkles on our face reminds us to reconsider lotion options, aching bones in our back hint at that inevitable end marching towards us all. The changes presented by life is evident all around us, yet our impulse is to have things stay the same. The changes presented by life fixes us in a cocoon of inertia.

You might recall (from these two previous post) that one variant of inertia can be understood as the tendency to do nothing, and three factors influence our tendency to do nothing:

1. Indecision – an inability to choose which activities to pay attention and which are worthy of neglect.
2. Disbelief – the uncertainty that an activity will lead to a remarkable end.
3. Environment – the nature and quality of the internal and external space we occupy. 

Of the three factors the nature of the environment we find ourselves has the most powerful sway on the course of our lives. It is possible to find ourselves pressed into inactivity from sensing all the activities ongoing in the internal and external space we occupy. We do nothing because there is so much going on.

While it is technically impossible for a living person to do nothing, we can accept the suggestion which lies at heart of the concept of doing nothing: There are activities which lack potency at leading us towards a kind of life we desire, the enactments of which net results in nothing – or scenarios far worse. And given that our environment plays a key role in how we enact activities, it can be of tremendous value to pay its influence on our lives a biased kind of attention.

A Bit About (Self) Discipline – It Might Be Overrated. 

A lot said about the power to navigate our environment in efforts to live towards a desired kind of life revolves around one human trait: Self-Discipline. It is this quality, as described by Brian Tracy in his book, No Excuses: The Power of Self-Discipline, that is "the key to a great life and, without [which] no lasting change is possible.” Giving light to the meaning of this quality, Tracy writes: "Self-discipline is the ability to do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not."

Put another way: We can make ourselves engage in activities towards building the life we desire by exercising mastery over our self and control over our actions – if we want to live in alignment with our best lives we must be masters in the ability to control our feelings, dismiss the conditions within which we find ourselves and rise to meet the challenges life throws our way.

But, as with most ideas posited as the key ingredient to living a desired life, the idea of self-discipline has remained subject to scrutiny. A line from Paul Graham’s essay What You'll Wish You'd Known reads, "I know a number of people who do [remarkable] work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline." And he has a point.

We can for a moment, given the above definition of self-discipline, bring to our mind a disciplined person who does what he should do when he should do it: He rises from bed everyday without fail at 5am. He is at work on the weekdays at the same time – 7:15am – and he shows up when he is called upon to serve over time on the weekends. His efficiency is driven only by his command over his feelings. He is disciplined. Yet to witness this person, if we are being honest, is to make peace with the reality that we have in our midst the presence of a robot – the kind of thing which mindlessly churns out actions without regard for situational changes. To witness our friend in a situation separate from familiar settings, say for example the case where millions of his red blood cells have been hijacked by malaria plasmodium parasites, would be to recognize a need of seeing discipline in its true light.

The push for self-discipline isn’t a prod to fixate oneself to actions. It is a call to keep alive the beliefs from which the actions arise, and (to) from those beliefs engage actions for which our current situation allows. To be disciplined is to be a disciple of a set of ideas. This is worthy of note because it brings to the fore of our mind that to navigate through our environment in efforts to live towards our desired life we needn't entertain devotion to premeditated sets of actions. We have to keep our actions attuned to the context of our life.

While self-disciple is an indispensable quality, we only derive its value when it operates against a backdrop of situational awareness. Knowing our environment, being able to accurately answer what is going on right now, is a skill which helps us cut through the influence of inertia, because it is through this awareness that we become alive to the ideas informing the activities (or inactivity) pouring forth from our life.

Dealing with Change 

The ironic truth is, it’s fixation to a set of ideas that makes dealing with the constant state of change presented by our environment doable. (The tricky bit arises from determining which sets of ideas are worth holding on to.) While there are books and books pointing to which ideas offer the best promise, we can start off from the one presented to us by our own environment: Change is everpresent. By understanding how constant the condition of change is, we can become attune to the dynamism occurring within our internal and external space. We can be resistant to the illusion of an unchanging life. We can become savvy at pinpointing the features that keep us trapped in a cocoon of inertia.

Enjoy!