The sneaky nature of Change
We're afraid of change. It doesn't happen as we think.
This is the Next: the Newsletter, the weekly newsletter that mixes personal essays and social critique, and, where I, inspired by literature, psychology, and all my spiritual practices, attempt to make meaning out of what happens: to me, and to us all.
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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about change: what prompts change, what holds us back from change, how change sneaks in on us, often without a preamble, or a warning. Maybe it’s because I turned forty this year, and the changes that upended my life were not the ones I anticipated, and seemed subtle at first. Which got me thinking about how often real change happens not, as we think, in a spur of the moment, but rather, over time, in a movement that, to me, resembles a waterfall: a sequence of drops, none of them apparently able to make even a dent in a stone, but which, altogether, can alter a landscape forever.
In Story Genius, which I am currently reading to learn more about novel plotting, Lisa Cron writes that a novel,
“starts when life will no longer allow your protagonist to put off going after that thing he’s long wanted, regardless of how much his misbelief—and, as we’ll see, his biology—suggest he sit this one out. Because no matter how dearly we want something, avoiding change is our middle name. That’s probably why the only thing that causes us to change, internally or otherwise, is an unavoidable external force.”
Cron, Lisa. Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel
And yet, thinking back to those moments in my life that marked significant strides in a direction previously unforeseen, I realised that what held me back wasn’t even the first step. It was, for better or for worse, some seething awareness of the domino effect of that potential first step.
In 2016, I signed up for a course to become a yoga teacher, at the HiYoga school in Majorstuen, in the West area of Oslo.
At the time, I was working for a media house, taking care of trafficking and monetization. Technically, I was supposed to be there at 8 a.m., but I took advantage of the flexible schedule (and, frankly, cut myself some slack as I sensed this was not what I was supposed to be doing or where I was supposed to be). My days felt boring and predictable: work until 4:00 or 5:00, to the gym after that, salsa class on Mondays and Wednesdays. I had time on my hands that I could have devoted to things that would have made me feel better: time for a psychologist, for journaling, for learning how to write. I mostly tried to keep myself busy, as it was the only thing that kept the angst at bay.
But when I signed up for my Yoga Teaching Course, telling myself it was time I changed and took responsibility for my life, my entire routine suddenly had to shift.
To pass the course and get my certificate, I was told I needed to complete at least 100 hours of classes. This meant showing up at the studio at around 6:00 a.m., so that I could practice, Mysore-style, along with other regulars, and learn to self-lead what is known as the First Series in Ashtanga. Overnight, I found myself starting to set the alarm at 5:30 a.m., 5:45 at the most, and taking the metro, then the bus, to reach an area of the city that, in my former life, I seldom crossed in the mornings.
Because I started getting up so early, and practicing for an hour and a half in the morning, I no longer had energy at night.
I kept up going to salsa classes for a while, but I soon swapped my evening plans to tuck myself in early, even on Fridays, so that I could show up for either my training week-end, or for led practice at 10:00 a.m.
In my yoga course, there was a woman who offered spiritual readings. Distraught as I was in the Norwegian winter, and trying to get over someone I’d been obsessed with for years, I booked a session with her. She came to my house, on March 8th—probably the most feminist thing I’ve ever done—and I sat there, on a chair in my room—eyes opened, feet on the ground—looking at her as she seemed to read the images that, clearly, were showing up for her in the empty space between my eyes and her mind. Suddenly, it was my story she was describing, but the way one describes a Picasso painting, a Guernica: a collections of lines, hardly a landscape, though you can see it, if you put the pieces altogether. All of a sudden, I could think of myself, my life, and all of “my issues,” from a perspective that was entirely new: one that helped me see how I had let myself feel power-less, and where I could be power-ful. It would not be an exaggeration to say I’d been stuck in a loop for years. But the day after the session, I walked into the cold Norwegian spring feeling as a teenage girl heading out to her first day at a new school. A bit anxious. Hopeful.
The forward momentum I inhabited in my practice and new routine made its way to my head. I could learn to think differently, I learned at one of the many yoga workshops I took. Neuroscience has shown that when we try to do new activities, the brain little by little builds new synapses that enable the execution of the new task, and gets rid of the circuits that no longer serve us. It sounded theoretical at first, but as I learned to move my feet in ways I hadn’t been able to before, and to set myself in poses that were as convoluted as they were unfamiliar, gave ways to new avenues of thought. The fear I had yesterday was literally gone today.
Thus, I broke off friendships that no longer resonated, and made room in my life. What for? I wasn’t even sure.
But all of a sudden, I, who had been single all my life, met a charming man. And all the little drops of change that had been piling up together, suddenly splashed forward with the strength of a waterfall in spring, and I let the water take me. Whereas before I’d been suspicious of kind men who seemed to like me, I gave myself the option to trust: in my feelings, in myself, in him, in us.
Eight years have passed since then.
I never signed up for my yoga teaching course with the intention of changing my whole life. Or maybe, I did. I thought I’d change careers.
But the truth is that it changed everything. Not what I thought was going to change. It changed the things I supposed I’d been putting off changing, and the things I never thought could change: the way I breathed, the way I loved.