Imagine a change you’re wanting to implement: an exercise habit, a meditation practice, a weekly phone call with a far-away friend. Or maybe you want to “subtract” something: sugar or caffeine; screen time; criticizing others. What happens when you picture yourself making this change? What words do you hear in your head? What do you see, as you imagine yourself doing this new thing?
A common response to these fears is either to give up in advance, or to summon a call to discipline to make the change stick. No excuses. Just get up a half-hour early and work out; just go to bed and read; just stop complaining—your negativity is poisoning the air.
There’s a cruelty here, underneath these exhortations. “It’s not that hard” can quickly devolve into “What’s wrong with you? Anyone could do this.” Or, “Why are you so weak, so self-indulgent, so unable to take care of yourself, so incapable of doing the thing you’ve tried to do, over and over, for years?”
If we want to change the broader culture, we have to find ways to engage change beyond discipline. If we want to do more than make small changes in our individual lives, we’ll have to build our resilience, our uncertainty training, because before we can even embark on change, we have to slow down enough to notice when discipline is in play.
It’s more than hypocritical to be invested in cultural transformation and to think I can get there through domination and efficiency—it’s demoralizing; it’s staggering; and, when I’m being kinder to myself, it’s evidence of just how steeped I am in the methods of self control.
When I look at the goals I actually stick to, it’s not because of my discipline, or because I’m a hard ass. It’s because of love. It’s hard to write that sentence. It feels squishy and vulnerable and naive. But I don’t mean love like “I love it!” I mean love like protection, fierceness, like coming back over and over again, when you don’t know what you’re doing, because you care enough to stay in it. Love that’s so immense that your daily frustrations and uncertainties and general laziness are just no match for it.
Toughness is about walling things off, including our relationship to our own pain. But being in contact with structural violence and oppression requires entering the pain of others, as well as our own. It requires an enlarged capacity for holding grief and outrage—the feelings we instinctively recoil from. But these feeling states arise out of our love. If we didn’t feel so much love, so much connection, we couldn’t suffer and grieve when others are in pain. To stay connected to that love can power us into that space of possibility. Even if we can’t yet envision its fullness, we’ve already touched a tiny version of it in our everyday encounters with all the forms of Being in our world. When you are wanting to change, even a small thing in your own life, ask yourself first to find its source in love.
