Frustrations of change

In this episode we explore some of the challenges of change - and why it’s always harder when we lose focus and discipline…

So this place I’m living in right now is a rental, of course, it’s all I can afford in these Covid-dominated days where there’s no paid-work to be had, but it’s a lot better than living out of suitcases in an AirBnB like I did when I first arrived back here but then it’s hard finding a proper place to live under those circumstances, but then I finally found a place to stay longer-term and I finally had somewhere to collect together all of my sort-of seventy-years’-worth stuff all-up from at least a dozen different places I’d lived in in maybe half a dozen different countries in a quarter-dozen different continents, and once I finally had all that together I could start to sort through it all and cull a lot of it back, so much duplication of stuff, you see, so many papers and books I don’t need any more and clothes that won’t fit any more, and I did do a lot of that sorting for a few months, but then I injured my leg and I couldn’t do much for while, and once I could walk properly again it got so cold because it’s winter here and the house doesn’t have proper heating so I could sort of only work in the one room that did have heating that worked that I had to stop sorting out all my stuff and I got so behind with everything else that, well, nothing got done that needed to get done, really, because I kept on having to change what I was doing and everything depended on everything else being done first so I got a bit stuck, and I’m still stuck, sort-of.

But now at last w’re sort-of into spring, sort of, and it’s getting a bit warmer but I still have to catch up with everything but all the desks and everything else ended up in the one warm room which means it’s all in the wrong place sort-of so I need to move it all back and find where I must have moved everything that I can’t find and there’s several hundred notebooks that I’ve moved around since I moved in here and there’s notes like bank-account passwords and so on that I really need and I can’t find and I’ll have to go through all of those notebooks to find them, or at least I hope they’re there but they might not and I discovering things that I have to do and I’ve forgotten to do and everything depends on everything else again which is why I’m stuck.

And today is the first time it’s been sunny and warm and dry, it was really wet earlier in the week but this is the first time that it’s dry enough and warm enough to cut the grass so I’d better do that, but I’ve only got that cheap battery-powered mower-thing which only cuts about a foot wide and the battery doesn’t last long so I know have to do this newsletter-post for this week but I’d better cut the grass while I can, so I get the mower out, the battery’s working all right, but I’ll get going on the bit that’s nearest to the house, and I get about half way through that bit and then the battery dies…

So I go back into the house and fail to do anything useful for an hour while the battery recharges and then I go back to the grass and remember that I ought to cut the grass around the clothes-dryer so that I can get to it even when it’s been raining, so I don’t finish the grass I’d been doing and I go to do that first so I can come back to the other grass later…

and I get about halfway through doing that when I remember that w’re getting close to fire-risk season and I need to clear the escape-path in front of the house so I stop doing the grass around the dryer-rack and turn to doing that path…

and I’ve only done a little bit of that when the battery dies again, so I put it back on charge and go back into the house and make a coffee and fail to do any useful work for an hour until the battery’s ready and then I get the mower out again and go back to working on that escape-route but before I get there I remember that I wanted to make a sort running-track thing around the other part of the garden, so I go off to make a start on that…

but there’s sort of a lot of heavy grass there and it puts a lot of strain on the mower and by the time I’ve done sort-of halfway round the second time round that bit of the garden the battery’s died again, and this time there isn’t enough time to recharge the battery before it gets dark so I’ll have to stop for the day, and that’s when I realise that I’ve done change after change after change so often all the way throughout the day without any proper plan that I haven’t actually finished anything at all.

So I really really really need to stop dithering around with random changes and random distractions and get back to writing this!

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(Yes, I do know that the writing above is an undisciplined mess - the description every bit as every bit as bad as what it was describing. But that’s the point about allowing ourselves to become unfocussed when working on any kind of change: it soon becomes a mess, whatever it is that we’re working on!)

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So yes, doing useful change can be hard - especially if we don’t finish the things that we’d set out to do, and even more especially if we don’t keep focus on the actual plan…

There’s another old phrase about this, too: it’s not necessarily true that people don’t like change - after all, there are many kinds of change that we want to happen in our lives. So it’s not that people always resist change, it’s that they resist being changed - especially if the change is only for someone else’s benefit. And the latter is what happens far too often in a possessionist economy: almost every change is only for the benefit of ‘the owners’, for those who already have too much, whilst every else would be left with even less than they started with. We need change to help us collectively face some of the huge changes that are coming our way, whether we like it or not. But those big-changes will need to be framed in a way that truly does benefit everyone - not changes that merely exacerbate the global-scale problems we already have.

My own random small-changes I rambled on about above, about cutting the grass and suchlike, made things that much harder and unproductive than they needed to be: all my own fault, of course, even if made that much worse in that case by the changes-not-under-my-control of the fast-repeated fade-out of the mower’s battery. And likewise for my routine failures in all those other things I talked about above - even if, again, some of them were affected by various changes imposed by Reality Department rather than solely from my own inactions and unfocused incompetence. Yet that’s true for all of us, too - look at how much the COVID pandemic has shredded our plans and more for so many people’s lives….

So yes, often change is hard - especially if imposed from outside by others or by Reality Department. Yet there’s much that we can do to ease that burden a bit: we’ll see more about what we can do about that as we go on in this series over the coming months.