OLD DOGS, NEW TRICKS

There’s no better place to watch the mechanics of change happening than in kids.

They say “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” (which, incidentally, is nonsense) and I suppose the corollary of that is that the young pups are constantly evolving.

Not just in the domain of skills, but also in the domain of behaviour.

As any parent will confirm.

Where it gets really interesting is when you realise you’ve got a little Zen master living with you, though at times I’ll grant it may not look like that. (Zen’s not about sitting around quietly, BTW.)

“What, the curtains?”

For a time, Croftus Minimus set some very clear boundaries around the living room curtains and TV watching.

What surely started as a perfectly reasonable shutting out of low, late-afternoon sun rays bouncing off the screen, quickly became a rigid, non-negotiable rule: the curtains must be closed whenever I am in residence in front of the gogglebox.

And, as any parent will confirm, when rigid, non-negotiable rules created by little people get alluded to, discussed, challenged or in any way negotiated — however gently, lovingly, or reasonably — there’s pushback.

(And when I say “pushback,” I mean total and utter meltdowns with tears and screaming.)

??

It was quite the thing, for a while. Whatever the weather, whatever the time of day, the living room (a shared space we traverse, on the way to the kitchen) had to be in total darkness whenever she was in there. Non-negotiable.

(This scenario was all made worse by the fact that these are big long curtains she couldn’t close herself, so we were made complicit in the behaviour each time, consigning ourselves to a life of darkness by turning the living room into one third of the household’s private cinema ??)

I gotta say, neither of the remaining two-thirds of the household enjoyed this state of affairs one bit, and we tried lots of different ways of tackling this; trying to change the behaviour.

Utterly fruitless. Nearly broke us.

A change of script

Let’s be clear what’s going on here. There’s a little invisible script being run, by the M.E.C. (Munchkin Ego Construct ??) creating rules like “I need x in order to be ok” that she was powerless to control.

It had grabbed its initial assessment of the experience — Ooh, this is so much better when there’s no light reflecting off the screen! — and innocently attached that good feeling to the state of CURTAINS: CLOSED. Maybe it had happened a couple of days in a row, who knows? And minds being minds, that fictitious little outside-in pattern had been set.

But the rule’s not true, it’s not based in reality, it’s just a mind, trying to control experience, after the fact.

And then, one day, many, many months later, it just changed. It no longer bothered her and she stopped asking for us to close the curtains, as part of the TV-watching ritual. Nothing to do with how much light was outside or anything. Her mind had simply stopped running the script about it and the behaviour changed.

Yes, you too.

It’s the same with us. It’s all natural. It’s all just the mind running scripts; creating invisible, fictitious, outside-in “I need x,y,z in order to be ok” beliefs in the background, manifesting in our behaviour.

Don’t try and change the behaviour, honestly, you’ll break yourself.

And of course, even reading that, your mind will probably be having screaming fits and it will look like I’m asking you to consign yourself to a life of darkness.

But it can, and will, change.

Can I explain it? Not really, no.

Just that if you create the conditions for the mind to drop away some of its invisible beliefs (love & understanding are good starting points) it will do it.

That ability is built in. It’s one of the best bits about the human operating system.

The young pups seem to ride that wave of change — Zen masters, see? — whereas us old dogs think we know better.

Maybe that’s what they mean?

??

Giles

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