An important read for our current moment of chaos and disorder.
Allostasis is defined as “stability through change."
The way to stay stable through the process of change is by changing, at least to some extent. If you want to hold your footing, you’ve got to keep moving.
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that you can’t step into the same river twice, for you aren’t the same person at each visit, and the water is ever flowing.
It is a powerful way to represent the reality of impermanence: Everything is always changing.
No doubt, change can, and often does, hurt; but with the right mind-set, it can also be a force for growth.
Plus, we have no choice.
Like it or not, life is change. We’d be wise to shift our default position from futile resistance to being in conversation with change instead.
The goal of mature adulthood is not to avoid, fight or try to control change, but rather to skillfully engage with it.
It recognizes that after disorder, there is often no going back to the way things were — no one form of order, but many forms of reorder.
The work is coming to view change and disorder not as something that happens to you but as something that you are working with, an ongoing dance between you and your environment.
You stop fearing change, which is to say you stop fearing life.
Overwhelming science shows that the more distress — what researchers call allostatic load — people experience during periods of change, the greater their chances of disease and demise.
Fortunately, the same science agrees that we can also become stronger and grow from change and that much about how we navigate change is behavioral; that is, it can be developed and practiced.
The way to partake in change is by focusing on what you can control and trying to let go of what you can’t.
Simple. But simple doesn’t always mean easy.
Navigating change and disorder requires equal parts ruggedness and flexibility.
To be rugged is to be tough, determined and durable, to know your core values, what you stand for.
To be flexible is to consciously respond to altered circumstances or conditions, to adapt and bend easily without breaking, to evolve, grow and even change your mind.
Put these qualities together and the result is a rugged flexibility: a gritty endurance that helps you maintain your strong core even in fragile moments.
Rugged flexibility allows you to step into cycles of order, disorder and reorder—which is, of course, one and the same with stepping into Heraclitus’s river—and to chart them skillfully. To know that yes, change can shape you, but that you can also shape change.
The book from which this is adapted is “Master of Change.” Read (or listen) to it for the deep dive on this topic, and really how to navigate challenge and disorder more generally. It’s available wherever books are sold.
