Stuck in Motion
Everything moves now except the one thing we most want to shift: ourselves
It’s a nightmare we’ve all had.
There’s some perfectly simple thing we have to do. Go up a flight of stairs. Cross the road to say “hello” to a friend. But something stops us. Our limbs have seized up, nearly paralysed, moving as though through treacle. The goal that was so plainly within reach turns unreachable. It slips away. It’s gone. And we wake up. But in our waking lives, don’t we feel much the same thing?
For a few decades now we’ve been handed everything we might need to change our lives. Divorce is nothing out of the ordinary anymore, and nor is moving into a new career, or going off to live somewhere very far away. We do long for change, too, whether to put our mistakes and our sorrows behind us or just to have a go at something new. And yet something holds firm.
When the moment comes to jump, more often than not we are petrified, frozen stiff. Change is easy now, and we want it, and still it proves terribly hard to actually carry out, even with all the outer barriers gone. That gap is a great source of existential suffering. A nightmare.
It has to be said… we live in a fairly tangled situation. There are three ages of change.
Up until the 19th century, everyone had their place and was expected to keep to it. Try to change your life, as Anna Karenina did when she threw it all over to go and live with the great love of her life, and you risked ending up under a train. In the 20th century we took to believing in great upheavals, the loud and radical sort. You could climb out of your station. You could dream up a better life on some communist promise of emancipation and go about overturning the order of the world.
But today the whole thing has turned far more paradoxical. Everything is forever in motion. The terrifying storms have given way to a churning that never stops.
The world has grown quicker, more fluid. We are told to become more flexible and more pliable, to grow nimbler, to fall in with the general ferment. Reinvent yourself, they say. Evolve. Move from one post to the next.
But when everything is shifting at once, it becomes almost impossible to make out the real, large changes of a life. Against a backdrop of small constant stirrings, change no longer stands out.
Besides, we always have a thousand reasons not to change, however much we may want to. We don’t know where to begin. Or we’re afraid it will only be worse afterwards. There’s the dread of becoming someone else, and a certainty that deep down people simply don’t change. Perhaps it’s already too late anyway. Perhaps there’s nothing new under the sun.
Think about it, though, and you see there are three big things that hold our wish for change in check. And three ways to get there regardless.
Reforming your habits… gently
The first has to do with what lies the deepest in us.
Which, as Paul Valéry once said: « ce qu’il y a de plus profond dans l’homme, c’est la peau » (what is the deepest in man is the skin) by which he meant our life as bodies. Say we sleep seven hours a night as a rule. We eat a decent breakfast. Before leaving for work we have a shower. We can dream all we like of a different, more thrilling life, but our resolve to change will go flat the moment we realise it would mean giving up our ration of sleep. And the two slices of toast. And the ritual wash.
Habits are written into our flesh and into the shape of our days. They are passive things and far more deeply set than we suppose. We ignore that.
They are the main forces ranged against change. The most ingrained ones come from childhood. From the way we were raised. From the milieu we belong to. Bourdieu speaks in this vein of “habitus”, “systems of lasting dispositions” (“The Logic of Practice”), which steer our practices as much as the pictures we carry of the world: “things to do or not to do, to say or not to say”, taken for absolute barriers when in fact they are nothing but the product of the social class we happen to belong to. That class rules certain practices out for us, certain transformations. The prohibitions come through as maxims we’ve swallowed whole: that’s not for the likes of us.
But the worst of it with habits is that you can pick one up in a few days, and then it lodges in you more intimately than the loftiest conviction ever could.
What can the will do against habit? To be fair… not a great deal. We all know that to save the earth from ecological ruin we ought to change our habits this very instant. But we find it hard. How couldn’t we not take the car to work? The plane when we want to travel? We may deplore the suffering of animals, and yet will we go without a good steak? What are reason and high principle worth against so insidious an enemy, one that sticks to us so pervasively?
The only way to shake off the bad habits might be to swap them for new ones, liberating this time, taking the form of exercise and discipline. What that asks for is reform. The revolution can wait….
Leaving it all behind
But there’s a second obstacle, at once simpler and heavier.
Fear… It takes every shape. Sometimes it’s an almost animal terror of the reprisal, since to change can be looked on badly, or forbidden outright. Anyone living under an authoritarian regime knows that to open your mouth against arbitrary power or corruption, to become anything other than an obedient citizen, can call down punishment. Everywhere in the world, becoming a dissenter, someone who won’t fall into line, carries a certain danger.
In the social sphere, there’s the dread of being seen and judged by other people. “What will my family think? My neighbours? The people I know?” That question is one of the great brakes on change.
The fear can turn to panic when the thing at stake is a plunge into the unknown. Other times it’s a more considered worry, a reckoning of what might come once you’ve taken the leap.
Working out the consequences is no exact science, because the future is contingent. Nothing guarantees it will all unfold as planned. There’s no assurance you won’t just make the same mistakes over again. And who’s to say you won’t set into the same repeated behaviours, shut inside some fixed, stereotyped way of being that you can’t manage to climb out of?
Some are locked into the part of scapegoat, of victim, of loser. This “repetition of life scripts”, as the psychotherapist Jean Cottraux called it, becomes a sort of curse laid down in advance, and it paralyses the very person who wants to change.
And then, of course, everyone knows the cure can be worse than the illness. Or every bit as much of an ordeal. A bare minimum of wisdom would tell you, in that case, not to budge so much as an inch.
Montaigne is among those writers who own up to their own faint-heartedness. He won’t follow any special regime to treat his kidney trouble: to suffer from renal colic and give up eating oysters is to have two ills in place of one, he writes in the Essays. Being no friend to novelty, he would sooner change nothing than serve the sentence twice over.
So Montaigne refuses to cast himself forward into the future: when I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep. And he admits as much: were I to live my life again, I would live it as I have lived it. He turns it into a moral maxim. « La plus grande chose du monde, c’est de savoir être à soi ». (The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.)
If you won’t accept the fate of permanence, even the smiling sort, there’s only one way out of the fear, and that is to do it radically, by committing acts there is no undoing. Break it off. Leave. Cut clean through. But that pure gesture carries a risk of its own. It can’t be foreseen, and it holds within it the chance of failure. The bold act is neither a practised discipline nor the fruit of long soul-searching; it rids us of fear by dropping us straight into the unknown.
On the collective scale it takes the shape of revolution. To throw out an old order wholesale can be violent, chaotic. There’s no guarantee against any of what follows: the disenchantment, the backlash, the return to order. And still, sometimes this act you can’t take back is the only way a person gets their dignity back.
Finding your way back to what you really want
The third obstacle is the more unsettling one.
At certain key moments in a life, we sense that all we’re doing any more is fitting ourselves to what the outside world demands. We carry out only what’s expected of us. We get pulled apart into small, contradictory duties. And so, we start to wonder whether we have stayed true to what we are, or think we are.
Dissatisfaction with ourselves sets in. Something has to change if we aren’t to split clean in two.
The whole question is which way to head. How to change so as to become ourselves again.
In situations of this kind, we don’t always know which part of ourselves it is that needs to change. Are we too cowardly or, the other way round, too reckless?
Take a member of your family you’ve been on cold terms with for months. You could force the matter out into the open and make the break final, and there would be a release in that. Or you could take the first step instead, try for a reconciliation, and, should it come to it, forgive them and make your peace with how they are. Ought we to stop going out in the evenings and give more of ourselves to our children? Or the reverse, to own our lives, drop the belief that we are indispensable, and live as we see fit?
Every one of us is stirred by all sorts of desires, some of them at odds with each other. And it’s hard to work out which is to win the day, Doctor Jekyll or Mister Hyde, if we are to come out of it more or less happy. So, the temptation is strong to do nothing at all, to let whichever part of us is the stronger simply grow. But that comes at the cost of suffering, with failure never far off. And there’s every chance of getting it wrong, of giving up your deepest urges in the name of a social or a moral conscience.
Jacques Lacan said that the one thing we can be guilty of is giving ground on our desire. This isn’t to say we should put our hedonistic wants first. What it points to is the need to move towards that unconscious which structures us and discreetly steers us. In which case it’s no longer through patient work on the body that change will come, but through the search for oneself, and then through staying faithful to what one finds.
This solution isn’t reformist, and it isn’t revolutionary either. It has to do with identity, though not necessarily in the political sense of playing up your cultural or ethnic roots.
Take the European Union. It’s the easiest example for me since I am European. If it works badly, that’s because it’s ashamed of itself and of the surrender of national sovereignty it entails. So, it steers a course between a moral “superego” (“never again war on our continent”), a liberal “id” (“Europe is just one big market”), and a bureaucratic “ego” (“the Commission is doing its job”). What Europeans ought to manage is to name their deepest desire, a federation of nation-states or else some post-national whole, and only then would they know how to transform their Union.
Our new world, flexible and liquid, where each of us has to adapt or go under, keeps churning away precisely so as to stop us changing ourselves, and changing it, along the lines of our own desire. Which is why the break, whether it comes gradually or all at once or somewhere further inside us, is harder now than it has ever been. And more needed.
And so, refusing the smiling fate of standing still, and half-trusting that the leap lands me somewhere better than the place I jumped from, I remain yours in whatever it is I am about to become,
Tamara
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Not a tip jar. A ledger for what you underlined in your mind.
One of the mistakes we make is convincing ourselves that who we are is who we think we are. If such a thing as identity exists, is it rooted in our aspirations, but in what we actually do? While it may be comforting to think that what we aspire to is the truest representation of ourselves, the more pragmatic view is that what we do is a much more accurate representation, because of the real-world consequences. Intentions only go so far, and aspirations can wander into delusion and grandiosity.
I've always thought that what we really want is reflected in what we do, because habits represent what we want. It's counterintuitive, but why do we believe that our high-minded self-image trumps our more automated behavior? Isn't what we do proof of what we want MORE? Maybe Bourdieu's "systems of lasting dispositions" reflects more of what we want than what we think and say? Or maybe it's proof of who we are, with our habitual behaviors existing as reinforcement mechanisms.
We're wired to always focus on what is missing; what we don't have. So our high-minded idealistic selves will always push back reflexively against whatever regime of habits we're currently administering. If you work long hours, the ideal becomes to have more fun; if your life is mostly leisure, you aspire to "get it together". This constant antagonism with the self creates the illusion that we must change, when in reality we are changing daily, whether we mean to or not, and despite our habits. The will is far weaker, and our prefrontal cortex likes to generate grandiose visions of who we are and could be. The truth is that all of these factors are duking it out inside of us, and who we ultimately become reflects the outcome of this struggle.
Astute as always, Tamara. Reading you is one habit I have no desire to change.
Monod said, "Between the great things we cannot do and the small things we will not do, the danger is we will do nothing." It's that stuck place, whether out of habit or fear or desire, that does us in, and, by extension, stymies and may even destroy others.