Snapbacks
A Challenge for Growth
Over the past few years I have experience a series of dramatic changes in my life. I don’t think I’m alone in this. Some of the changes were instigated and welcomed, while others were surprising and not necessarily desirable. Regardless, the changes came.
Change is an interesting idea when it is combined with the idea of growth, and more specifically transformation. For those of us who consciously attempt to work towards a different (and better) way of living, change is a requirement. Yet, we will be confronted quite often with a world that is organized against such conscious transformation. The world around us is more often organized around regularity of habit, reactive decision-making, and a desire for stability.
Human beings are affected by their social relationships. The idea of finding “our tribe” has been a popular way of explaining that feeling when we’ve found others who simply “get us.” They are similar enough, if not the same, in the fundamental ideas that govern our lives. This core similarity circumvents the divisions that may come by any other difference. There is a resonance deep within us when we keep the company of our tribe, and for good reason.
When describing the parts of the human being Dallas Willard defines the soul as the wrapper of all the parts. It is a part in and of itself that also encapsulates all others. Within this wrapper, Dallas puts social relationships. I like this model, as it honors the deep interconnectedness we experience with those around us. We are not just affected by others, we are connected to them in deep and sometimes mysterious ways. The things that happen in relationships that require separation are often hard because of this. They are not always bad, but they are hard.
The Snapback
I’m describing all of this as I’ve been thinking about the idea of a snapback. For a significant portion of my life, I had the opportunity to travel to teach or speak. In each opportunity I had the opportunity to meet new people, see new places, and experience new activities. I often would be traveling alone, and all the newness would affect me deeply. I would come back home different than when I left. But I would be returning to a community, geography, and way of life, that had not experienced what I experienced and therefore was not affected at all. Most times, reentry was relatively smooth. Other times, however, reentry was hard.
The hardness of reentry was not solely due to the unchanged nature of what I was returning to. It was on account of the familiarity I had with the context I was returning to, too. I would easily return to the regularity of life I had in spite of the effect of what I had experienced while away. The way of life I had lived couldn’t be interrupted with just a one-week expedition to a far away land. The new ideas I had would dissipate within a few weeks of returning. But what if the interruption was significant enough?
Everything can Change
With the extent of changes that I’ve experienced and the number of people in my life who’ve also experienced changes in the past two years, I find myself in a unique circumstance. On one hand, my life and the life of those around me has been interrupted enough to open a window into a new way of living. I’ve tried to start new habits, set new goals, and pursue new ventures. On the other hand, there is still just enough familiarity around that I can land back in old habits and let go of any new dreams.
New things are not always good, just as old things are not always bad. But human beings are living things. Living things grow and growing things change. The question becomes how we navigate the change. Do we push towards the newness? Or do we look back towards what we have lost? In order to more fully understand what I was thinking about I reached to a friend and fellow artist, Lisa Marten, who had written about reentry experiences here. Our conversation unveiled a combination of factors at work in times of reentry, which have since grown in my mind. I’ll try to recount them here:
Change, Death, Grief, and Patience.
When we are affected by dramatic shifts in our lives, there is an inherent desire for things to “go back to the way they were.” It seems that the drama of the shift, and the loss associated with any change, color the shifts in a negative light. “Things are changing,” we may say, “and that can’t be good.” Without desiring to minimize the hardness of all of this, I will just say that it takes a lot to imagine that we can suffer loss, walk through the associated grief, and that life can be better on the other side of it all. But that is a possible reality. What if there was goodness in the future that required losses to be experienced to be fulfilled? What if the goodness of the future is something that we wanted? Would we be okay with the losses? Would the experience of the losses overwhelm us into not moving forward?
Change will always require loss. If not anything else, there are aspects to our own person that will have to go away for new aspects to come into fruition. We can’t remain tempted towards anger and contempt and experience a life of peace, for example. The availability towards anger and contempt would have to be lost, to gain the life of peace. With loss there is often the experience of grief. This is not a bad thing. Grief is the normal and natural multifaceted experience that comes with loss. There is quite a bit of good writing and resources available on grief, so I won’t go into too much depth here. It is enough to say that I have cried long and hard, many a day and night, over things that I wanted to get rid of in my life. I’m going to restate that for clarity. I have grieved over losing things, that I wanted to lose. This loss and grief happen even when we are talking about ourselves – who we used to be, and who we are becoming. That is, our old nature that must be put way to allow for who we are to become to come to life. The putting away of the old nature is akin to death. It is harsh language. But think of the alternative. If we keep little bits of who we used to be around, we never fully become who we are to become. So we walk into a death of old habits, reactions, and stability, for the sake of new habits, responses, and transformation.
One of the challenges when change and grief come is the fact that what lies ahead is an unknown. Going back, then, is going back to a known state. This is tied to comfort, familiarity, and a kind of peace. Unknowns can bring stress. This is especially true for those who have past experiences that reinforce aspects of unknowns that are tied to real life danger (threats to one’s life or livelihood). There is fear there. That is a natural response. Think about those who have had to encounter war, famine, economic shifts, or deaths in the family. These are not easy experiences.
However, if we desire to change towards goodness, all the same kinds of things will happen to us. Our living or livelihoods may be disrupted. We will grieve the loss of our old life. We will desire for things to go back to the way they were, just because we knew what that was. We will experience moments of newness alongside snapbacks to past ways of living. We will experience fear of the unknown future. In the midst of all of this, patience and compassion are our friends. Patience is the willingness to take the time for a particular hope to come, regardless of immediate or momentary circumstance. Compassion begins with an understanding of the reality of a situation, and completes itself with a corresponding and relevant act of kindness.
Patience in this scenario will lead towards steadfastness – a simple albeit slow movement towards goodness in spite of the subsequent losses we know we will experience. Compassion will lead towards acts of care towards ourselves and others as we experience snapbacks, growth, grief, and transformation. It is all okay. It may be hard, but it is okay. It is the necessary process towards transformation to goodness. Somedays I wish there was another way. However, if stagnation, or worse hopelessness, were the only other option, I’d choose the hard road of change toward goodness – snapbacks and all.