The time to start practicing is now. Over the past few years, the river of change has been flowing mercilessly, and it shows no signs of letting up.
Societally, we’ve undergone a pandemic and its economic fallout, the combination of which has shifted how we live and work. Hardly a decade after the widespread adoption of social media, a new technology that may be far more powerful, artificial intelligence, is looming on the horizon. In our personal lives, we continue to do what we have always done: relocate, start jobs, quit jobs, change jobs, get promoted, retire, get married, get divorced, experience illness, have children, become empty nesters, bury loved ones and on and on.
It’s like our friend Heraclitus advised: The only thing constant is change. It’s not just that hard things happen without adequate notice and in a short period of time; it’s that a lot of things happen without adequate notice in a short period of time. Our ability to work with these changes is directly related to our life satisfaction.
Given all this, simply normalizing and creating a steadfast expectancy around change goes a long way. So does realizing that the allostasis mind-set doesn’t ask us to sacrifice all agency. Rather, it asks us to partake in change by focusing on what we can control and trying to let go of what we can’t. When I catch myself resisting or shutting down in response to change, in my head I say some version of the following: This is what is happening right now. I’m doing the best that I can. What, if any, skillful actions can I take? Do this repeatedly and eventually you start to get better at it.
Navigating this gulf requires equal parts ruggedness and flexibility. To be rugged is to be tough, determined and durable, to know your core values, what you stand for. To be flexible is to consciously respond to altered circumstances or conditions, to adapt and bend easily without breaking, to evolve, grow and even change your mind. Put these qualities together and the result is a gritty endurance, one that helps you maintain your strong core even in fragile moments. It allows you to step into allostasis’s cycle of order, disorder and reorder — which is, of course, one and the same with stepping into Heraclitus’s river — and to chart it skillfully and whenever possible, to your own benefit.
