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I'm self conscious
Why is it that change feels so inherently terrifying?
When I was younger, I used to scoff at those who professed such a proclivity: experiencing fear at the notion of changing.
Sadly though, if I'm being fully honest, I think I used to scoff at most earnest admissions of reticence. I was, after all, conditioned to see the acknowledgement of the experience of fear of any kind as either weakness or else some sort of dour defeatism, and therefore sought to distance myself from such unabashed concessions at any and all costs.
But nevertheless... I used to think I lived for change, thrived on it.
It took me until far more recently than I'd cared to admit to become humbled in the light of the revelation of the reality that for me... the change I actually fear the most is a cessation of the ceaseless parade of consistent inconsistency that characterizes my day-to-day existence in this world.
I don't think it really gets to count as change if it's always happening.
I'm pretty sure that's actually just cleverly disguised stagnancy: a hamster's wheel illusion of movement. The ego affirming, comfortably paced treadmill like trappings of true inner activity.
A great modern poet once wrote that her....
"opponent was always on the go and won't go slow, so as not to focus,"
....and, she noticed...
"he's no good at feeling uncomfortable, so he can't stop staying exactly the same." *
Those lines hit really close to home.
On some subliminal level I fear I must be terrified of the deep true motion I feel sure will emerge when I grow strong enough to grow still.
Which returns me with newfound humility to the question of why change — that which is outside a given ongoing sense of somehow comforting normalcy, however partially or wholly undesirable that normalcy might be — is so very scary.
If I think about going from a state of pain — so familiar as to feel normal — to a state of lesser pain — so new as to feel largely unknown... why would that feel any way but desirable?
And yet it does seem to me that for a very fundamental part of me, even a painful but predictable normal is less existentially terrifying than a truly unknown new experience.
What's that phrase?
"Better the devil you know?
Recently... I found myself enthrall to this beguiling philosophical notion:
Determinism.
It seems to state, not that we can't choose, but that we can't choose our choice. We are in essence, at the complete and utter mercy of the genetic environmental causal sphere into which we're born.
Think about it...
Every action we take: what if it's the only action we possibly could take given absolutely everything that has led to this precise crossroads of the great weaving of all that's ever been, which we are experiencing as this singular moment?
I feel as though I often find myself actively making choices I wish I didn't want to make.
It's not that I don't choose: that I'm controlled by some evil puppet master hoisting my limbs and jabbering my jaw up and down while I silently scream in abject refusal, trapped inside my own head.
No.
In that moment, I want to make the choice... I want to do it. And so I do. All the while thinking about how much I want to not want to do the thing I want to do.
I find myself blown away by the fascinating duality of two mutually exclusive truths existing side by side in my head:
I want to do this...
I don't want to want to do this.
And so...
When facing the prospect of change in my life, which feels so desirable but so unfamiliar and therefore so inexplicably yet undeniably terrifying, I suppose what I can say is that I want to want to change.
I just don't always actually want to.
And so oftentimes, I don't.
Enjoying the comfort inducing hamster wheel of perpetual false motion while all the while wishing so earnestly that I actually wanted to stop staying exactly the same.
I don't know...
What do you think?
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