On the instants of change
I’ve just begun Paulo Coelho’s latest novel, The Devil and Miss Prym, and was surprised to be confronted in its preface with a belief I thoroughly own. The surprise wasn’t in the belief itself, since on tons of levels I resonate with Coelho’s thought, but rather in realizing it totally contradicts, at least on first blush, another of my convictions. So I want to explore this contradiction and see if it really exists.
Here’s the quote:
Each of the three books [in Coelho’s trilogy And on the Seventh Day] is concerned with a week in the life of ordinary people, all of who find themselves suddenly confronted by love, death and power. I have always believed that in the lives of individuals, just as in society at large, the profoundest changes take place within a very reduced time frame. When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not yet ready.
The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back. A week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destiny.
My view of destiny is broad, and is more about a pulse inside of us than any pre-ordained script, so maybe don’t get caught up on that part. The idea I’m most intrigued by is this one that “the profoundest changes take place within a very reduced time frame,” and “a week is more than enough time” for such changes to take place.
I think Coelho’s right. Totally. For all the apparent slowness of progress–inside ourselves, in the world around us–big things often happen in an instant. Big ideas get born, equations get solved, accidents kill, decisions get made, yeildedness happens to an inner voice, or to some person that we love, but haven’t been able to reconcile with. These things happen quickly, don’t they?
Or do they?
One of my biggest frustrations with certain brands of Christianity is the way conversion is understood in them. In such places, conversion is seen as the moment when a person magically transforms from something they’ve always been into something totally new. Bam! No process, no recovery, no counseling or hard work. A single prayer and the person is, or should be, if they were sincere, a happy, joyful God-child. Forever.
I have many problems with this, but for now I’ll focus on one: that person who prayed that special prayer? They won’t be happy all the time. They won’t always have joy. And odds are the same patterns that got them yearning for salvation in the first place are still, moments and even weeks or years after conversion, just that. Patterns. Anyone who has broken a pattern knows, with a few remarkable exceptions, that patterns take lots and lots of practice to break.
The transformations I’ve experienced thus far have taken terribly much time to happen, or at least I experience their unfolding that way, and the happiness and joy that I experience now, in far greater abundance than ever I experienced in any orthodox fold, have been won by terribly much work. Hundreds of hours of journaling and pondering and reading and talking and sleeping and waiting and sighing and crying and laughing and going to therapy. I’m an evangelical believer in healing and transformation and redemption and change. But I’m an angry mama bear at the suggestion that such things should happen quickly, or easily, or in response to some pre-scripted prayer.
But–and this is where the yieldedness I mentioned earlier comes in–I do believe in tipping points. I believe processes, for all their infinite unfolding, contain moments like Coelho talks about, choices that confront us, and on which mountains of things, whole worlds of things, depend.
So here’s my conclusion: I believe in conversion (religious and not), and that a choice in a moment, experienced as a turning from old to new, can make all the difference in the world. I believe a week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destinies, and also that our destinies are far more tenacious than to let us go if our choice, in such a week or moment (or weak moment), is against them.
November 3rd, 2006 at 5:41 am
Lovely post, especially the tipping point image and I couldn’t agree more about the process. We are in a continual lifelong journey of unfolding. I recently was listening to some CD’s by Michael Mead who is a storyteller and deals with the mythic imagination. One was on Fate and Destiny which I found fascinating as previously I would have said I believe in neither. He talks about fates as those agreements we make when we enter this world to live in a particular familial, social, cultural, gendered context that shape us and make up the patterns in our lives. Our fate can either lead us away from or toward our destiny, it depends on how much energy we spend fighting them or listening to them and how they want to guide us. Destiny he said comes from the Latin destinares, or aimed at the stars and described it as the one thing we must do in this life, not as a pre-planned script, but our unique gift in the world. The thing we often spend most of a lifetime fighting against. This is of course an over-simplification of his ideas, but I was very taken with them.
November 3rd, 2006 at 6:12 am
I think you are right on all counts. I have had life-changing weeks, but I have also had long slow transformations.
Well said.
November 3rd, 2006 at 11:52 am
hmmm, really interesting thinking, thanks. I feel like we in the West have a luxury not found elsewhere. And, since we do, we get to ponder things longer. then, there’s also being in the moment, being present, which I’m finally getting more of an idea about, which makes my life feel very different than it has in the past, like decisions come a lot slower, and I feel into things more. anyway, am looking forward to picking up this book, thanks for the recommendation, and nice to bump into your blog, and this whole series of women blog writers. got here from sage said so.
November 3rd, 2006 at 12:14 pm
Christine–I really like what you’ve described of Mead’s fate/destiny discussion. No matter what words we give to those concepts, both seem real–the idea that we are dealt a hand of cards (fate), and these can be navigated in such a way that we’re “stuck” a lot of the time, or in such a way that we grow more and more free to give our gift/s to the world, unencumbered. What this makes me wonder is if the ability to navigate in this latter way is also a kind of gift or fate, though, made up of nature and nurture and all the people and events in our lives that have participated in even our capacity to flourish. Is it really a choice to “fight the good fight”, or is it a gift, or series of them?
Heather, thanks.
Albert, so nice to meet you! Yes, I think you’re right: philosophizing isn’t possible in so many situations. And being in the moment seems to come so much more easily when we’ve had enough food, sleep, sex, etc. Cultivating the kind of presentness you’ve described without such things seems possible, but a lot harder. And maybe what you mean by this being a luxury in the West?
November 7th, 2006 at 11:33 am
This is a great post, thank you for being brave enough to work it out “on paper”. My initial thought on Coelho’s quote is that there seems to be a disconnect between what happens based on a 3rd person observer vs. what happens from a first person perspective vs. what happened when we look back (either 1st or 3rd person) and closely examine the causes. I think from a 3rd person angle it is much easier to see how an external event can have significant impact on a person in a short period of time. However, from the backward gazing perspective, I think it is much easier to see how this has been a process that culminated in the large event. And the person who is actually going through that process probably just feels like their trying to keep their head above water and how dare the rest of us talk to him/her about how much the event (or the process) has changed them. So, I don’t think that your two views are inconsistent at all, rather they seem to reflect different perspectives on the same issue.
Anyway, I’m not sure this really contributes to the conversation, but thought I’d share my thoughts :)
November 7th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
Hannah, I think you’re exactly right! Snapshots are so different from lived reality. Seems like that’s the difference you’ve described here so well.