Could Be Something. Could Be Nothing
Hurricane Lee is here in Maine
When our daughter was young, we’d have to detail exactly when we’d be leaving somewhere to go somewhere else. She always wanted to know all the details, when we’d leave, why, where we’d go next, how long we had to stay.
Sometimes she didn’t like the news.
“Everything changes,” we’d tell her. “Eventually, it gets dark and you can’t stay at the playground. Eventually, people need to go home to dinner.” And so on.
One time, when we told her about a bigger change involving a grandparent, she stared us right in the eyes, stomped down her foot and announced, “Change is stupid.”
Her three-year-old self didn’t want any poetic waxings about change and life and inevitability. She wanted things nice and known and comfy.
How do you not want that, really? There’s so much safety in knowing what you’re doing, in what’s going on, in not taking risks in leadership or life or even just trying a new recipe at home or dish at a restaurant. When you always love vegetable korma, why would you want to try something else?
Yesterday, I posted a photo that I took on Facebook. It’s of some flowers that I saw.
And today we’re having a bit of a Tropical Storm named Lee. It’s windy. Powerlines have come down in other portions of our Maine island. Pogie the dog is not into it. Those flowers are probably having a rough time of it right now.
One of my friends responded that those flowers will be gone, but maybe there will be a different kind of beauty in an upturned tree with a rock shaped like a heart embedded in its roots.
The thing is that change happens. Beauty goes away. Land and community are transformed and if we’re lucky, they build again. I wrote a story about that in Apalachicola
According to an article in the Harvard Business Review there are ten main reasons that people resist change. The main reason is a loss of control.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter writes,
“Change interferes with autonomy and can make people feel that they’ve lost control over their territory. It’s not just political, as in who has the power. Our sense of self-determination is often the first things to go when faced with a potential change coming from someone else. Smart leaders leave room for those affected by change to make choices. They invite others into the planning, giving them ownership.”
And, of course, sometimes change is actually bad—or at least it is initially.
There’s an article in Psychology Today by Diana Hill that lists some ways you can try not to resist change quite so much.
“Riding the wave of uncertainty” seems like a weird thing to write about as my coastal community has storm surge, but there’s something there, some sort of wisdom in that, I think as right beyond my computer, there’s a dragonfly clinging to the screen of my window, trying to ride out the 60 mph wind gusts and our police officers ask for more officers to come in early to help out.
Communities and people change. Many stoics believe that the best way to ride that wave of uncertainty is to be certain in who you are and what you believe. That makes sense to me. Being cool with yourself, knowing your skills, knowing your ethics, and knowing your weaknesses (but don’t dwell on them) helps with those changes.
I was at a Harbor Committee meeting this week and this fisherman announced about the storm, “Could be something. Could be nothing. Hard tellin’. Hard knowin’.”
That’s sort of like all change and all life, I think. It could be something. Or not. What we have to do is ride through.