I’m entering a period rife with change and uncertainty, mostly by my own choice. I just left my wonderful job (on great terms) with no real ‘career’ plan. We recently had to put our dog, Mojo, a beloved member of our family for the last 15 years, to sleep. I’m writing this on the opposite coast from where I’ve spent most of my 27 years, and I’ll be here for the next 2 months. My change is something I’m very excited for. A vacation in San Diego for three weeks with my family. Then a month of road tripping with my brother, zig zagging up the West Coast, a dream trip of mine. I’m sure this change will get harder once the adventure is over, but right now it’s exciting and care-free.
In the past, I’d be freaking out internally about all of this, worrying what my next step was going to be. I’ve always been prone to worry. But right now I’m not that worried. Occasionally panic flares up, and I just take a deep breath, recognize it, but I don’t engage it in thought. I just feel it. And then it passes. I believe I’m better able to do this now because of changes I’ve already faced and endured.
I don’t think I fully comprehended change, or life in general, until my Dad passed away suddenly at 54. It gutted me and my family. I learned for the first time, viscerally, that change is absolute. There’s no value system to it and it can come at any time. Change is guaranteed. That has informed how I live and a lot of the decisions I’ve made since.
It prompted me to change myself. Eventually, I scaled back my drinking to now nearly non-existent levels and I quit porn. These two habits were recurring activities in my life for years as an adolescent and into early adulthood. I replaced it with meditation, writing, journaling, exercise, marijuana, great food, books, TV, movies, deep conversations, diving into interests and learning about them, and adventure. These changes and the work that went into them have allowed me to feel kinder, gentler, more vulnerable, braver, and happier than, well, maybe ever before. That took a lot of hard work, practice, struggle, and repeated failure. It took a lot of active change to eventually see fuller aspects of the change cement itself.
Change has been on my mind and I want to share some of what I’ve learned about it, and how I’m trying to experience this change now and going forward.
The Paradox
Change is the only constant in life, yet our reflex is to try our damndest to make sure things stay the same. On a basic level, change is uncomfortable. Change, even when begun in the pursuit of bettering ourselves, will bring up stressful feelings in the process like doubt, worry, anxiousness, fear and panic.
This pull to remain the same despite our constantly changing world is also an innate impulse inside of us, defined by natural laws such as homeostasis. Homeostasis is the tendency to maintain equilibrium, within ourselves and the world as a whole. It “characterizes all self-regulating systems, from a bacterium to a frog to a human individual to a family to an organization to an entire culture—and it applies to psychological states and behavior as well as to physical functioning”. Homeostasis is the reason why when we attempt to change a habit we so often backslide into our old behaviors. “Our body, brain, and behavior have a built-in tendency to stay the same within rather narrow limits, and to snap back when changed”. And for good reason: “if your body temperature moved up or down by 10 percent, you’d be in big trouble. The same thing applies to your blood-sugar level and to any number of other functions of your body.” Without homeostasis, we would die very quickly. But, homeostasis, “like natural selection and like life itself, is undirected and does not have a “value system” — it doesn’t keep what’s good and reject what’s bad.” This is a crucial distinction. Homeostasis resists all change. “After twenty years without exercise, your body regards a sedentary style of life as “normal”; the beginning of a change for the better is interpreted as a threat.”
I encountered this while cutting out alcohol and porn. Alcohol was easier because of hangovers, or the lack thereof. Porn was a lot harder. Even though you know it’s bad for you, it feels good in the moment, and being the most biologically rewarding function, the pull is much stronger. I backslid and relapsed a ton. Eventually I carved out a new normal where I wasn’t craving it.
But then came the change of living without it. And that’s where I started to recognize the underlying root addiction or tendency more clearly for what it was, and how it so easily and imperceptibly affects so many of us today. The root lies in comfort itself; or put another way, the urge to avoid or numb any and all discomfort.
When I stopped drinking and porn, I replaced it with marijuana. Habit change is also indifferent to value systems and nearly any habit can replace another if it’s strong enough, good or bad. In this case it seemed like a perfect trade off, one that I’d still make. But eventually I realized I replaced one habit of comfort with another. In my opinion, a much less harmful one, but still a pull to comfort that takes a level of control and feeling out of my life. Instead of working on something I’m passionate about, or seeing friends, or experiencing new things, or just being bored by myself, lonely or sad or worried, I was blocking all of it out by getting high, and then usually eating and watching TV. That’s not the worst thing in the world, especially compared to darker vices, but I think that’s also what makes it harder to break out of, because it seems so harmless. Life is change and this habit keeps me comfortable but stagnant. Now I know working to change this pattern will bring its own challenges and uncomfortable feelings. But awareness of the problem and the road ahead is the first step. The awareness of comfort as the root of it all will hopefully help get me through it.
The Root
We cling to what feels good and we try to avoid what feels bad. It’s our nature and just seems like common sense. We try to avoid, at all costs, a void. With smart phones, social media, entertainment, drugs, and all of the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, we no longer need to feel something as mundane and previously common as boredom, let alone deeper and scarier feelings like existential dread or our own mortality and ultimate death.
Comfort blocks these scary things out. But according to ancient wisdom and cutting edge science, the most important thing to do is to FEEL IT. The Buddha to Seneca, Marcus Aurelius to Garry Shandling, Viktor Frankl, Tara Brach, Pema Chodron and many more, all agree: Trying to avoid our feelings created by the change and reality around us only digs ourselves deeper into a hole and increases our reliance on the thing that makes us not feel discomfort, even if it ultimately makes us feel worse in the long-term.
It’s uncomfortable to realize how little power we have in the world. It’s uncomfortable to recognize how much power we have over ourselves. It’s uncomfortable to feel embarrassed or awkward, sad or lonely, stupid or angry or jealous or ashamed. But by simply paying attention to the feelings rather than reacting to them, they actually lose their control over us. As Tara Brach says, “When you see and feel the sensations your are experiencing as sensations, pure and simple, you may see that these thoughts about the sensations are useless to you at that moment and that they can actually make things worse than they need to be.”
I’m not quitting all of the things that bring me joy in life, like movies and books, great food or some marijuana. But I would like to change my relationship with them, towards a more balanced, healthier approach. I want more time to experience new things, meet new people, nourish relationships I already have, and feel what I’m feeling, whatever it is, in the moment.
But right now, in this time of change, I’m just going to plant myself in the here and now, and enjoy myself and time with my family. There are much harder places to do that than San Diego. Pema Chödron says to “relax into the groundlessness of our situation”. Any time I feel worried about the present or future, I try to remember this quote and take a breath. By embracing the fact that we are insecure and vulnerable, that we don’t know what tomorrow will bring, we are freed to truly feel and live, in this moment now.
I don’t know what my next job will be and I’m not sure where I’ll live 6 or 12 months from now. I’m not sure what my next attempted habit change will be but I have some ideas. I do know I feel best when I’m living in the present, embracing the change, learning new things, struggling, and trying to become better. I am 27. In 27 years I will be 54. I hope to make it there and live on well past it, but the evenness of it both weighs on me and propels me, to live these next 27 years to the absolute fullest.
Post-Script
Going forward, beyond personal self-improvement and this west coast adventure, I’m going to focus on writing. I’m finishing a screenplay I’ve been working on for a while and submitting it to competitions in May. I aim to be more active on this blog too. It still isn’t quite what I thought it would be. I think I had the wrong preconception. I imagined I’d post something each week with original, breathtaking thoughts. But more and more I’m thinking of this blog as an archive, and my role on it as more of a curator, for what I’m into, what I’m learning, and what I’d like to share with you. Nothing is original, and the internet and the world it’s created is so gigantic, I might as well just share what I find interesting, helpful, or joyful. More practically, it can be a personal archive untethered from the social media conglomerates that rule today and could be gone tomorrow. As Austin Kleon advocates, I’m owning my own turf with this blog. And it can be whatever the hell I want it to be.
I saw a retweet from Kleon by Paul Boag that inspires my fresh outlook on this site: “I know it sounds kind of arrogant but I am bloody proud of my blog. Everything I have learned over 13 years all nicely organised and documented. I find myself referring to it everyday. It is an invaluable tool. More people should blog.”
I think that’s a lovely idea.