The Honest, Gritty Truth about Change

Our capacity as human creatures to change, shift, and transform – to upend a life, identity, or trajectory to create a new one – is one of the most awe-inspiring marvels of life, in my experience.

We all possess this power, and that’s a beautiful truth.

But I don’t often see a lot of honest conversations about what change actually is and what it requires.

Change is wonderful – it’s also often hard and weird. It’s dangerous alchemy and volatile combustion. This is true whether the changes are good or bad, chosen or not, external or internal.

Because when we undergo a change that cracks or shatters our sense of reality or asks parts of us to die to be reborn, there are moments of empty (and perhaps terrifying) uncertainty, moments when we are confronted with the questions: who am I, and what is real? – and don’t know the answers.

And this unknowingness is destabilizing and catalytic – and certainly not as safe as the status quo.

I was reminded of this recently. I was having a hard mental health day and feeling confused about it, until I remembered I was in my own process of transformation. And since those changes were internal (and invisible) rather than obvious in my external world, I had overlooked the care I needed to navigate the process.

Because often, the actual, lived experience of transforming is one of our whole system being wobbly, out of alignment, and in an uneven, jumbled mess as parts of us deepen, grow, and expand, while others are left behind and trying to catch up.

I try to remember to expect all of this so that I can be intentional in creating space for my body and spirit to integrate, rest, and heal. Because there will probably be hard days, and things will probably get broken along the way. And when I can expect this and (sort of) prepare for it, I can more easily let the current carry me along and invite care and grace into the process.

Knowing vs. Certainty

When I feel like I don’t know what to do next, there’s a good chance I’m confusing certainty with knowing.

Here’s the difference as I understand it:

Certainty wants a guaranteed outcome, promise of safety, clear view of the whole path, and list of step-by-step instruction, whereas knowing is the truth available now that takes me to the next right thing.

Knowing unfolds as we go.

This is often super frustrating to me. Because I even though I know (or can find a way to know) what’s true for me now and what the next right thing is, this often doesn’t feel like enough – at least to my anxious, small self who prefers certainty and would choose the guarantee every time.

But the path is unfolding and so are we, so the truth of our knowing is never a once-and-for-all conclusion we can hold ahead of time.

Instead, knowing comes with engaging life, walking the road, making wrong turns, and deepening into our embodied, intuitive wisdom.

This way of knowing reminds me that life is an adventure of trusting what I know in the moment and remembering that for now, this is enough – the rest will unfold when it’s time, and I can trust my own capacity to be with the uncertainty in the meantime.

The Comforts of Uncertainty

In recent years, uncertainty has become one of my greatest comforts. I find so much relief in reminding myself of all I do not know.

Mystery has become a pathway to peace.

My mind (like yours perhaps) loves projecting, predicting, and catastrophizing. It loves looking at a frustating situation, hard moment, or painful truth and spinning and extending it into distrous visions of cataclysmic ruin.

Left to its own devices, my mind usually opts away from the reasonable, low-drama approach. We’ve had to work hard together to get to any measure of calm composure and grounded equanimity.

And while its talents for creating patterns, making judgments, and crafting predictions have been immeasurably helpful in all sorts of ways, my mind often needs to be reminded that it is not the omnipotent power it presumes to be.

So this is what I do to help it along: I remind myself that every thought I think and every idea I believe is less than the absolute truth (because my mind does not have access to absolute truth). I remind myself that there are gaps – often significant ones – in my stories, beliefs, and predictions. I remember that interpretations of reality and actual reality are two very different things. I remind myself that I can never know for sure what will be real in 5 years, 5 weeks, or 5 minutes.

An important note: uncertainty is not denial. In other words, uncertainty does not refute what’s real or bypass what’s hard. It doesn’t say: I can never know anything, so I’m just going to opt out and ignore reality. It simply says: I do not and cannot know the whole story. I cannot know the future of what is now. And I cannot grasp the whole of reality in all its complexity, possibility, and dimensionality.

Which brings my energy and attention back to what is here for me now: in this moment of time and location in space.

Since I cannot know how the story ends, I am left with presence, mystery, and an open space where the only real and necessary thing is how I choose to live these questions: what will I do, and who will I be in this moment before me now?