The power *of* change. Not the power *to* change, like this adaptation pines for:
God grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change,
the courage to change the one I can,
and the wisdom to know it’s me.
“I’m working on myself,” is a phrase that never sat comfortably with me. After all, I was not the agent behind so many forces that shaped who I am.
I’ve lived through a span of sobriety, and I have failed at smoking cessation countless times. Sometimes I controlled my diet and carried through on exercise, but I’ve never been in full control and sustained it. I may have felt like I was changing myself at the time, but of course I can see plainly that it didn’t stick.
Each of us is a control freak. It seems that, in general, when we are younger we believe we control much more about our fate. That seems to diminish as we wisen with age.
When I sit down to work, I am creating something with an end in mind, but it rarely turns out just as I plan. The job work we do is to produce something in the future. I don’t think that’s entirely what it means in the phrase “working on one’s self.” Or, I don’t know, maybe that is what it means – that you aspire to produce a new you.
But I am such a small force, such a small agent of change, compared to how the world works on me. The unfolding of events far beyond my control seems like what is working on me. Sure there are other cultures around the world and in the past that held rugged individualism in high esteem like Americans do, but I think it’s plain foolishness to think it common. Or effective. Plainly, it’s a relatively new invention.
In cultures of the past, and in massive other cultures today, the notion of fate and destiny and the will of the gods is far more prevalent. Even here in America’s antiquated Christian ethos, the interplay of “God’s will” and free will is a messy enterprise. Let’s not pretend that that ideal is not an ideal, far from reality. Millennia ago, even free Roman citizens and their elite governors prayed and sacrificed to gods.
Whether they did it sincerely, or we do it sincerely today, is irrelevant. It is a rather explicit acknowledgment that we aren’t in sole control of our own lives. And an atheistic rejection of religions and gods still doesn’t reject lack of agency in controlling our own lives. Whether the forces of change are “supernatural” or “natural,” they outnumber and outweigh us as individuals. They do immeasurably more “work on us” than we “do on ourselves.”
What therapists try to do is shift our framing of the past, present, and future so that the emotions attached to them can shift as well. You see, that can’t be done at will, by conscious thought, because our emotional response to the world has mostly subconscious wiring.
Mindfulness is work on our inner selves. We call it work because it’s hard, and it sticks only in elite practitioners. Therapists and self-help sources preach a “mindfulness-lite” because they know almost no one can stick to it religiously and don’t want their patrons to feel bad about that:
Enlightenment is something few achieve.
The Enlightenment opened the eyes of many only by naming “natural” that which was previously considered supernatural. “Laws of the universe” replaced gods with natural forces, also far beyond our control. Do you see how – from the perspective of forces that “work on me” – it is irrelevant what these things are named?
Nietzsche applied his great mind, upon the “death of God,” to an alternative framework. One way to frame his philosophy is that he gave up on caring so much about the natural and the supernatural, and concerned himself, instead, with how an individual might respond to the forces so infinitely larger than the individual.
While physicists, mathematicians, and biologists were occupied with larger forces of nature, Nietzsche’s model of the uber man concerned the response of individuals, and I daresay that focus was bequeathed to Freud and Carl Jung, and the latter couldn’t resist re-broadening the frame to the larger forces now called Jungian archetypes.
You see? This interplay of work on one’s self and the work of the universe on one’s self is a messy affair indeed.
I’m not saying it’s rare to succeed at changing ourselves, but the world is a much larger force. It changes us. And I think the real change of which we are the agent is how we perceive the changes in us, and contemplate them consciously.
Authentic contemplation can lead to “integration” (which has gone by several other names like “self actualization”), so that the attributes we desire in ourselves can be recognized time after time. Until, one day, anticipating something upcoming, we consider it in that shifted frame. “How do I put love first in this coming event?” How do I prepare my psyche and my body to receive the coming unknown with some more openness – not anxiety or resentment?
Seems when I am a conscious force in my own mind and body, I just might be more of a force in the world. Of course this nonsense doesn’t always work. It’s messy. And messy means we aren’t in complete control. But then again, I really never have been; why should I ever expect to be?
As you reframe your past, I would encourage you not to exclude the dark parts. Remember when you started to draw, and everything was stick lines, and then an art teacher, perhaps, taught you how to do shadowing? It gave depth to your drawings. The dark shadows of your past are what give depth to the canvas of your life. I prefer forces with depth over the shallow.
I’m quite certain that I alone am not enough to change the enormous mess that I am. Thank goodness I live in a world full of other forces of change.
God grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change,
the courage to change the one I can,
and the wisdom to know it’s me.
Perhaps God answers not by changing our traits or status or constitution or behavior, but by changing our mind – by way of our heart – about who we are.
The Enlightenment diminished the heart in favor of the rational. That attempt wasn’t new at all. The Greeks and Gnostics were predecessors, and a millennium and a half later, the Middle Ages’ scholastic Aquinas tackled it afresh with a Judeo-Christian wrapper. Jung “discovered” that the pendulum Nietzsche had been forcing to one extreme (individual liberation) couldn’t prevail as “meaningful” without some form of transcendence (universal archetypes, mythology, etc.), the psychoanalytic school drew the pendulum back to re-ground the purely rational within its proper context – the bodily brain animated by the heart-ier soul.
From The Buddha to Jordan Peterson, we are reminded that life is the suffering cauldron out of which authentic meaning emerges (e.g., Peterson here) where he points out that the Nazis reversed the symbol on Buddha’s breast). Richard Rohr frames it this way:
Somehow our experiences, our mistakes, our dead ends are not abhorrent to God but the very stuff of salvation (Love and Power)
and concludes with the paradox that the work the larger world has done on us can be connected to work on our selves, enlarging our consciousness of how enormous we are as individuals:
Authentic power is the ability to act from the fullness of who I am,… and the freedom to give myself away.
Perhaps this world which changes us is a *good* place, oozing with love, and dripping with grace. Perhaps.
.
Neil D. 2023-10-19
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