another book exerpt....

This comes from a section which could be considered more "self-helpy", but an interesting subject nonetheless. It deals with change in all it's forms and progressions. Enjoy. Change fosters introspection, introspection fosters change. A good way of testing the level of change your experiencing is to gauge it’s effect on your comfort level. Typically, your level of comfortability runs congruent with the depth of change: for example, the more uncomfortable the experience, the deeper the change, the more pleasurable the experience, the shallower the change. Our ability to adapt is amazing, but it comes at no small cost. Making choices which lead to deep change mean leaving some integrated parts of us behind, and never turning back. Deep change demands we question everything we hold dear and draft up an account of our past actions and behaviors. It takes a lot of gumballs to lay yourself bare in the face of your past in this way. We are not naturally wired to enjoy submission and vulnerability, and no one gets off by being scrutanized and picked over by the birds. But there is life on the other end of the pain. The faster you realize all is folly, the faster you see the world in pure, genuine form. Genuine joy. Genuine elation. Genuine sorrow. Genuine empathy. Whatever deep change takes, it gives back tenfold. The deeper the change, the greater the self awareness. The greater the self awareness, the greater the ability to change. The greater the ability to change, the greater the personal empowerment. The greater the personal empowerment, the greater the chance of experiencing life in it’s truest form. Your reward , in the end, is honesty. From there, you have nothing to lose, but everything to gain. The more you let go, piece by piece, all you’ve built, all you’ve toiled and struggled over, the more your identity changes. You become secure within yourself and your surroundings, and the little things that somehow always set you off, slowly wash away. You are pulling yourself up by the roots and transplanting your entire person into good soil. If the contents of the soil are rich and pure, so you will be also. Surface level change, on the other hand, requires little effort and is relatively painless. It satisfies our desire to move, to migrate, to avoid being a stationary being, pinned down by the exoskeleton of routine. To keep us occupied and refreshed and spinning in orbit. But the high it gives us can be unsatisfying, leaving us continually running on what psychologists refer to as the “Hedonic treadmill” (originally named so by Brickman and Campbell in their essay entitled, “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society” ca. 1971). Basically, when surface level change and selfish ambition become the centered focus of an individual’s pleasure, they’re spinning on a continual looping vortex of hedonism, going faster and faster in relation to the amount of things they acquire. Their happiness begins to decrease with each self-pleasing endeavor, and their taste buds become over-saturated. They lose their ability to enjoy the small things in life, and life becomes less and less simple. The more they spin, the more the twisted complexity and chaos strangle them....and the more they seek surface level things to escape their impending suicide. This cycle continues on and on as they ride a never ending loop of perdition right into the sandpit of their own humanity. Again, evolution is, and always will be, your enemy. It will beckon you to the path of least resistance. The easiest and most painless way.....like a spider in a cave, waiting your arrival. Since surface change lends itself to being a pleasurable experience, it can easily become a death trap. The path of life is beckoning you to follow it into deeper ways, but human nature will tell you to stay ashore and kick your mess farther down the road. Deal with it some other time, some other place, but its never going away unless you look it directly in the face and attack it like you own it. Ironically, people who grow accustomed to quick, self centered change, are typically the least adaptable beings on the planet. For them, the concept of change revolves around their schedule, their time, their will. They become the least pliable, least adaptable of all creatures, and money and possessions only heighten the effect. There are advantages to being poor, one being the continual ability to adapt or die, to appreciate what you have for what it is, and to rely on others for help. The richer and more isolated a person becomes, the more they demand life adapts to them and follows their ways. Those people suck, they’re no fun to be with. They are self tortured souls who will carry their misery deep into their own grave. *** After a long, hot day working in a slum on the outskirts of Manilla, Philippines, I turned to say goodbye to one of the ladies whose residence we had been working in. She looked me in the eyes, big wide white toothed grin on her face, and said, “goodbye....God bless you.” So thick was I in the work we were doing, I’d not yet processed my experiences from the day, but in that instant, some thread snapped and everything sank inward. For a brief moment, I stared back, confused and thrown off. Here she stood, three kids to look after, no potable water to drink, no electric, a home filled with the stench of swine, leaning walls, dirt floors and a decrepit tin roof, yet her words were full of life and sincerity. There was such joy in her eyes, how had I not known this joy before? How, despite all my pissing and moaning and thrashing, had I not seen it? Why was it so simple and so elusive to me at the same time? In that moment, I saw clearly through all the white noise and electric static who I really was....I was the poor one of us both. She had nothing to lose and everything to gain, she was rich beyond comprehension, and when she reached out and shook my hand, I felt as though I was touching the hand of God. I could speak nothing in return, only turn away, red faced, head down, weeping quietly as I walked back down through the backstreets and alleyways of that unknown, indiscreet slum, back to my soft bed and warm home miles away across the open ocean..... I think of that woman often. I think of the gift she gave me. How she was the final crack in a glacial shift in my ways of thinking, feeling, and seeing the world. I think of how her blessing broke me and pushed into some dark recesses of my heart and mind. About how kind she was to bend down and share her wealth with this poor, withering soul. Her words moved me, not for the novelty by which she spoke them, I’ve heard “God bless you” a thousand times before and a thousand times since, but for the very weight of character that lay behind them. Life sprang from the well of this woman’s soul, and when she spoke blessing, her words had power. Power to change and be changed. Power to know in a deeper way. Power of vision and purpose. Power pushing through external circumstances and little provision. The power of all eternity and heaven come down to earth, made incarnate in a poor, widowed mother.