“There is no meaning of life without an account of the changes that can happen in it,” writes Adam Philips in his wonderful meditation on our desire for change – a contradiction that is well translated in the study of the thoughts of the Vampire Problem, which shows the confusing psychology of why it is so difficult to change, to break the patterns of being, how safe we are, and how safe we don't want to know.
Our paradox is that we are pattern-seeking animals – a kind of superpower given to us by our complex consciousness – but we always pay the price of consciousness: Like the hero of Greek mythology who is always frustrated by his tragic mistake, we pay for our power with our vulnerability. The patterns we discover – fractals, the harmonic scale, the laws of planetary motion – give us a firm grounding in reality, freeing us to know the world as it is, in all its terrifying unknowns. But the patterns we establish – in our habits, our relationships, our myths and the power structures and organizing principles of civilization – bind us, harden us with certainty until we grow too old to change.
In a world that does its best to mistake us for certainty for safety, living with the courage of uncertainty – the courage to break the pattern of the familiar to release the possible – is a radical act, an act not just of resistance but of redemption. The building blocks and operation of that courage, as an inhibitor to the fear reflex, is what the therapist, teacher, and organizer are. Prentice Hemphill reflects on the first episode of trauma therapist Mariah Rooney's wonderful MOVD podcast:
The fear is absolutely there, and the fear is often the driver towards being alone, in my old pattern, the thing that I think will keep me comfortable and alleviate the fear. But what changes our patterns, ultimately, is the courage to feel that fear and do something different anyway. You step into the unknown and you don't know what's going to happen – that's an act of courage.
This reorientation is not just a decision of the brain but a collective action – something that gives the courage to change, or just the courage to find the real, even more difficult and more urgent in the neo-Cartesian culture that keeps pushing us away from the comfortable life of the body as undifferentiated artificial intelligence makes for us the world with real decisions and real decisions. lichen, trembling with life – takes less and less space in our mental model of reality. Hemphill celebrates this necessary regeneration of the body as an instrument of transformation:
Everything we do to find our abandoned features or parts of our body that we have left behind, all the actions we take when we work and fear rather than allow the isolation recommended by fear – those are the times when we begin to change our pattern.
In What It Takes to Heal: How Changing Yourself Can Change the World (public library), Hemphill looks at the psychophysiology that makes fear a powerful automatic:
When what we experience is beyond our ability to respond and/or escape unscathed, or when we are given a message to suppress the body's response, our nervous systems do not know that the painful experience is over, and our survival response continues to exist in our body. At that time we live in an almost constant state of reaction, either scanning for an indication that the threat has returned or recreating aspects of the experience in our relationships and living in what many understand as an attempt to eliminate the threat we feel. It lives in our tissues, our muscles, our thoughts and our emotions. It goes on in our behavior patterns, in our habits, what we do and don't do, what we say and what we fear to say… You can have a region of your body that lives longer, without a step, and you all… The memory of a life of ten or twenty years before can be embedded in the structure of your fasciae, therefore in your actions and in your relationships… Our painful bodies last for a long time…
Against this situation, courage may be to refuse to separate ourselves, to abandon our true nature or surrender to our ideas about what life should look like, ideas organized automatically that are not examined and not challenged. Insisting that “every inch of progress, every aspect of love, every truly meaningful action from here on out will happen with courage, not comfort,” Hemphill wrote:
Courage changes things and courage changes us. How do we become. I have found that there is a “right size” fear within any vision of change, and in taking bold action we cultivate the part of us that cannot speak and hold fear without letting it lead… The courage we need is the courage to fail and stay… The courage to step out of the safety of our mortal illusions… The courage to surrender… The courage to love and be loved.
Train George Saunders on the courage of uncertainty and how to reveal our hearts by breaking our patterns, and revisit Charlie Mackesy's wonderful watercolor meditation on how to bear your fears and what it means to love.
