[Archive] Meditations on change
Dear friends,
I’m starting to work out what good these letters are. Thank you for your feedback, big or small. Did you know you can click the 💛 at the top of this email to give me some anonymous feedback? Give me my engagement!!
Really though, I like to hear about which parts of my writing you like because it helps me get better, but also because it tells me a lot about yourself and what you are currently feeling; that has inherent value to me.
I was surprised that some of my friends reacted very emotionally at particular points. I guess things which are obvious to me are under the surface for you and vice versa. So to my surprise, writing more personally was incredibly rewarding; more so than trying to write some generally insightful ‘think-piece’.
I feel really happy when people feel at liberty to express these things to me [1]. I don’t mean that in some weird boastful way; I just mean to express that I’m glad to be of service when I’m capable. It makes me feel strong, even if it’s uncomfortable. In a way that’s both saddening and heartening, I see that a lot of us just have the same problems.
The word ‘resonate’ is used a lot with reference to art, synonymous with ‘evoke’ or to create feelings and impressions. But I think the physical definition is much more articulate: it describes the amplification which results from striking an object with a frequency that is equal or close to one of its natural (pre-existing) frequencies. Resonance is hence a crucial phenomenon to not only creating, but also literally hearing music. I think that’s why writing personally is so awkward and hard but rewarding; it takes an embarrassing amount of honesty with myself to hit the right resonant frequencies that people naturally share. But if I get it right and turn up the volume, I could play something novel and beautiful. In the meantime, thanks for letting me tune my instruments.
In gloomy, angry moods, however, I feel the temptation to withdraw - to climb into a little drawer, wrap myself up in a muslin cloth and affect that I’d never said a thing, had nothing to say and no love to need nor put out. This has been somewhat the case lately; I’m slow with this letter because I’m loath to write anything. In light of that, I’ll allow myself to send it, utterly imperfect. 😊
Reading time: 7 minutes
Themes: Change, personal stories
Meme value: What’s that?
Meditations on change
“Big changes are an illusion. All changes are small. There are only longer and shorter feedback cycles.”
- Kent Beck (programmer)
🕳️ Change as unknown: How are your Early Twenties chalking up to expectations?
I've always heard about the turbulent twenties, so much so that I thought I'd already been spoilered out of experience it. That has not come to pass. Early twenties and identity crises go together like the Queen and corgis. One gem my friend Andy gave to me was that "it's better to have lots of mini-crises early on than one big one in the middle of your life." That makes me feel a lot better.
I never gave a shit about coming to Europe a year ago … but I'm excited (and apprehensive, as excitement would usually come coupled with) for what lies in the coming weeks. For the first time in a while - since this year, I think - I'm not so sold on the whole narrative of change, experience, openness, etc. I think I'm somehow already getting fatigued and arrogant. I used to feel that broadness of experience was innately good, but these days I desperately want to know what it is I need this experience and change for.
I wrote this in an email to my friend Andrew to mark the beginning of my exchange semester. Looking at it now, my writing wasn’t totally honest. There is a sense of dissatisfaction, and all dissatisfaction implies a craving for change. So when I said I doubted that change is innately good, I really meant that I feared I’d find there was no change to make me happier. Dismissing it - as well as the concept of “finding yourself” - as trite didn’t absolve me from the fact that it was still privately what I wanted.
I initially felt anxious at the prospect of measuring whether I was changing. It takes such interrogation of the ego to figure out which disparate components comprise I, and then even further distress to ask which components and to what degree those components have changed. Was I kind? Am I kinder? Was I smart and ambitious? Have I lost it? Such language also reifies the self as an object built of real parts. In any case, any expectations I had of change were quickly thrown out the window whether I liked it or not.
☁️ Change as relational: Change is better naturally understood in relation to things and people rather than in relation to I, and they always seem to happen behind one’s back. Like when I watch Tarantino films and think, “Hmm, this isn’t nearly as clever as I used to think”, or glimpse a message I’d sent a year ago and feeling acute distaste, or notice sympathetic joy [1] for an ex where I had expected jealousy.
Over the weekend I met up with a friend over a brunch of ceremonial commiseration and more-than-pleasant conversation. On some problems and changes he was going through, I said to him, “Well, even with all your problems, I just don’t really worry about you. Your reflex is to look outward to others before looking inward; I don’t worry much that you’ll launch into a destructive loop of self-absorption.”
It’s my belief that if we remember to look outside ourselves enough, we can never feel overly stuck or lost. Something is always being reshaped: dying and being re-born, taking on meaning and physical form, that it is simply not possible for us to maintain the same relationship with the world and therefore remain the same our whole lives. But in order for change to be perceivable, you have to cultivate the patience to look away for a little while every now and then.
I am getting into cloud-watching - a childish hobby, and one that is absolutely fabulous for abstract thinking and the intellect more broadly! If we as a society came together to normalise and encourage adult cloud-watching, I am convinced that we could achieve world peace. Looking towards the sky - day or night - is the best possible remedy for those losing track of their place here on Earth.
- A quarantine letter from a friend.
💮 Change as hope: When I wrote to Andrew at the beginning of exchange, I’d done so with images of past experiences whirling around my head. Experiences from which I’d expected some kind of reformation of the self, or new lasting relationships.
A few years ago I took a short trip to Thailand on a sustainability conference. Those of us who hadn’t come with anyone shared a twin room with another conference-going stranger.
I was already settled into bed when Milly stumbled into the hotel room, severely jet-lagged from her flight from Sweden. She collapsed onto the bed and waved limply. “Hiya, I’m Milly”, she said in an unmistakably and endearingly Kiwi accent. In the dim light, I made out her tired smile and introduced myself back. “Oh, good! I just love Australians!”
I remember thinking how strange she was, and also how much I liked her. She got excited talking about how she knew her ex-girlfriend would become the first Secretary-General of the United Nations, and gave the conference organisers hell for showering us in material excesses. She had every right to: we stayed in five-star hotels and were served in the thousands with totally non-vegetarian-friendly banquets. It was an event full of privileged people - myself included - paying to feel less guilty about their privilege by hearing humanitarian leaders and members of the UN speak loftily about sustainability issues. And yet even though this was true and made her angry, she wasn’t cynical: “People think the UN is powerless, but the UN is just made up of countries. And countries are made up of governments which are made up of societies which are made up of people who are made up of decisions.” Of course a staunch vegan would say that.
I thought it was overly sentimental, but for some reason, I wrote it down. Her spirituality and total openness almost unnerved me, being someone who saw myself as ‘secular’ and scientific. But it didn’t unnerve me enough that we didn’t share our personal stories and motivations with each other. She was deeply moral but not righteous; compassionate but also ruthlessly acerbic and goofy. She turned out to be the first person in whom I confided about my long breakup, a whole month after the fact.
I was hopeful we might stay in touch, and that way I could get something out of the trip. We took a polaroid and she expressed a kind sadness at the ending of the trip. She said the next stretch of life would be offline because she was spending it at a Nepalese Buddhist retreat. I asked her if it made her sad to leave so many places, and she just said “Oh, of course, but you get used to change so much you just have to enjoy it.”
We didn’t stay in touch and I remember her rarely, but I always trace back to her advice which got me into meditation much further down the road. I recently discovered a book on spirituality and meditation by a Tibetan monk (“In Love With The World”) [2] and shared it on my feed, and she messaged me telling me how much she loved to see it. I laughed because I couldn’t explain to her that if we hadn’t met, I probably would never have read a book like this, and that I can’t stop being thankful for it.
💸 Change as profit and loss: One of my favourite poets Rilke wrote the Ninth Elegy (one of his ten Duino Elegies) as an exaltation of transience. He calls happiness the “over-hasty profit of loss impending”. This refers to the way in which we regard our own happiness with suspicion in the face of transience. The comedown of a drug; dissatisfaction after a promotion or perfect grade; the death of a romance, usually in the mind before the flesh; the angst of losing one’s childhood, and also the opposite: the loss of the seemingly permanent - the parent.
But categorically refusing all forms of loss impending is a flavourless existence. It’s a lazy, cynical, technically correct answer to the exam question. Meeting countless other people like Milly and then moving on started to grind my spirit down; breaking up started to make me jaded; my heart closed up to the multitude of feelings which still remained for me to experience.
I met someone on my exchange semester whom I was hesitant to date, much less love under the four-month expiry date; all scenarios clearly lead to disappointment. We would either get to know each other well enough to dislike each other, or like each other enough to hate to leave each other. But I did it anyway. We went to Italy; I squeezed his hand when he looked down in disappointment on seeing people acting inconsiderately of others, and he tip-toed around on the creaky floorboards of his room while I meditated and reminded me when I forgot. He wanted to avoid fights because our time was limited; I wanted to fight because avoiding it would diminish us in our limited time. We did hate to leave each other, but more than that, we loved to have had each other. [3]
The morning we woke up to leave for Heathrow airport and break up, I scribbled haphazardly on a piece of paper smaller than my palm while he packed his luggage:
I have no way, nor the time to explain how much you have helped me be kinder, more open and unimaginably happy at this time in my life.
We become unhappier both for refusing opportunities for happiness and clinging excessively onto them. I won’t go to the infuriating length of saying that all suffering is self-afflicted, but I do think that we commit to our suffering by struggling against the persistence of change by clinging to or denying it. This isn’t an indictment of what’s nothing more than human nature, but I think it’s a language that offers us an understanding and therefore (slow, but legitimate) path forward. I don’t always know how to guarantee my happiness through change but I know how to guarantee my unhappiness - and given that, I can get a little closer to understanding the former.
In my last week in Europe, I wrote again to Andrew regarding anxieties about returning and some issues I needed to sort out but couldn’t until I returned.
He wrote back: If you wait, try to remember that thinking about it doesn’t change it. Life will never be as it is now, so it’s worth taking a look.
Footnotes
[1] Engagement!!! A reader reached out with a flattering criticism:
I think there is a lot here that is worth being discussed; I initially wrote my whole piece around it but it somehow lost its weight. Anyway, I thought it was a cool level of engagement, and it lead to a conversation where he told me about how he had sat down and literally named and defined his own personal values. That was interesting.
[2] Sympathetic joy: This is simply the opposite of jealousy (or more correctly, envy): it is feeling genuine happiness in response to someone else’s happiness.
[3] “In Love With The World” by Mingyur Rinpoche: Meditation and reading books like this has lead to and vastly shaped my writing, amongst other things, in case that isn’t obvious.
[4] “Loved to have had each other”: I completely acknowledge that this is just a cute re-wording of the shittest saying ever invented, “It’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all”
Thank you for reading. I didn’t expect that I’d have so many people to write wistfully in the past-tense about - the human imagination is a sentimental, silly place to be.
Love and patience,
Marlene