CHANGE THE LIBERATOR

There are lots of books about 'change', and lots of people who like to tell you it’s a good thing for you (which it may well be, but it often proves to be better for them)

So here is the real win

Most (and probably all) of us have a mental ‘map of everything’ which comprises of a few solid, tangible planks of reality, on top of which are deposited several layers of stuff that we either assume to be true or are too lazy, or busy, to question. And by God they FEEL like they’re real, probably because they’ve been there so long …until KAPOW! we get socked in the kisser by a change which knocks our assumptions for six like a break of billiard balls (or sporting metaphors) hurtling each and every way

Imagine…

The British Museum, early 1970s. By chance a younger you just happen to be there while they are re-configuring the Egyptian galleries. To an innocent (and here I'll give you the benefit of the doubt) bystander these towering granite Sphinxes and statues LOOK like they’ve been standing in London, not Luxor, for thousands of years… but in fact they’ve only been in situ less than a century. And now they are on the move again, being hauled by gangs of men with ropes and pulleys just like their Egyptian counterparts had done millennia before. No matter how big they might be, stone statues are only static until someone moves them. Museums are only temporary treasure houses (we nicked a lot of the Egyptian exhibits from Napoleon, who nicked them from the Turks, who nicked them from the Romans, who nicked them from the Greeks, who nicked them from the Persians, who nicked them from the Medes...). However, the fundamental mathematics behind Archimedes’ compound pulley, that most of the above used to shift the bloody things, will remain constant in all universes that we can currently account for

And why is this important?

The fundamental principle behind ALL the main schools of psychiatry is that ALL humans, to a greater or lesser extent, suffer because of irrational beliefs that they acquire before they are old enough, or strong enough to question them. Most therapies then revolve around discovering and disabusing the patient of those stubborn, unquestioned beliefs (using therapeutic ropes and pulleys to shift the ancient stone slabs of irrational thought) but nothing knocks down the idols like a sudden period of change. The temptation (or compulsion) is to rebuild to the previous pattern, but there will normally be a brief, shining, window of opportunity in which a new design can be created to better reflect, and serve, the priorities underpinning current reality

As long as we can fully understand why things were as they were, and distinguish and separate the acquired legacy thinking from what is essential, change can make a real and lasting (and liberating) difference