The Paradox of personal transformation

Inevitably in life, you'll be presented with the option to change yourself. To change how you live. To take a new path and see what happens as it unfolds.

Sitting on the precipice of change, we can't see what's ahead. The path is shrouded in fog. How could we know what's coming when we haven't walked that path before?

The fear of the unknown keeps us on the precipice. On one hand, we feel an intuitive drive to make a change. On the other, fear compels us to stay exactly where we are.

So what do we do?

L.A. Paul wrote about the paradox of human transformation in her book Transformative Experience (https://amzn.to/3JEtrUZ). To demonstrate the paradox of transformation, she does so through the analogy of choosing to become a vampire:

"The trouble is, in this situation, how could you possibly make an informed choice? For, after all, you cannot know what it is like to be a vampire until you are one. And if you can’t know what it’s like to be a vampire without becoming one, you can’t compare the character of the lived experience of what it is like to be you, right now, a mere human, to the character of the lived experience of what it would be like to be a vampire. This means that, if you want to make this choice by considering what you want your lived experience to be like in the future, you can’t do it rationally. At least, you can’t do it by weighing the competing options concerning what it would be like and choosing on this basis. And it seems awfully suspect to rely solely on the testimony of your vampire friends to make your choice, because, after all, they aren’t human any more, so their preferences are the ones vampires have, not the ones humans have."

If you choose to undertake radical personal transformation, it doesn't happen rationally. A spreadsheet with pros and cons won't provide a sufficient answer for you. Ultimately, the choice is to move forward to experience that which can only be experienced and to learn the lessons that are taught through the process itself. As she later states:

"But as it turns out, like the choice to become a vampire, many of these big decisions involve choices to have experiences that teach us things we cannot know about from any other source but the experience itself."

The paradox has something to teach us. If we sit with it long enough and contemplate the unknown path ahead of us, we may come to the realization that we don't know what the future holds for us AT ALL.

The fear of taking a new path, and that the new path is laden with risk, is an illusion itself. The future is fundamentally unknowable, so how can we say that staying on our existing course is any more or less risky or valuable than straying in a new direction? After all, we haven't walked the new path so how can we say for certain that one path is better or worse than the other?

So, don't approach opportunities for change as an analytical decision. The choice isn't about getting the bigger prize that sits behind door number 1 or door number 2.

Undertaking a process of change, and setting out on a new direction in life, is about choosing if you want to see what the new path has to teach you. Do you want to learn the lessons that can be learned only through the journey itself? And do you want to experience the change in character and perspective that can only arise through walking a new path?