The Winds of Change

I was walking on the Millrace trail by the water on a chilly, drizzly winter day when I passed a Philosophy professor whose classes I attended without academic rigor in the ‘90s, to our mutual displeasure. I like her now. She’s friendly to me and we had lunch one time and made our peace. She was wrestling an umbrella. As we greeted each other she commented in a matter-of-fact way that the path was slicker than the icy roads, and on top of that, the wind was constantly changing directions. I smiled and said at least it was not as cold as it had been the previous two days, and we went our separate ways, she to the north and I to the south. Or so it seemed. 

As I walked, I thought about her comment about how the wind kept changing directions, forcing her to battle that umbrella. Although the hiking trail runs north and south, it also curves around a small farm plunked in the middle of our Midwestern city, wedged between the Millrace and the Elkhart River on the flood plains. The way the trail curves around the farm means that northbound walkers (as my professor friend was that day) must turn toward the east for a hundred yards or so, then curve back north and around to the west before continuing north again. At various moments, as the hiker’s directional arc changes, they are oriented toward about half of the possible compass points, all the while thinking that they are traveling north, which remains generally true.

As I walked along the way she had come (without an umbrella of my own to distract me) I soon realized that it wasn’t the wind changing directions, at least, not much. It was primarily the professor who was changing directions, causing her own umbrella issues in relation to the wind. To be precise, there are also trees which may cause some swirling of air currents, and sometimes there are not trees, and since this is not intended to be a scientific paper we will stop with the analysis of wind on the Millrace before we get to what Lao Tzu called “the ten-thousand things” because the point is that generally the wind was steady that day. Other factors are irrelevant. So, we do not need to be precise, which is the kind of attitude that earned me poor marks in Philosophy but would have gotten better marks in Poetry.

This is common human behavior: to assume that we are the ones who stay the same while the world changes around us. My wife pointed out that we say “the sun is setting” but the Earth is the one moving, and we stand upon it in perpetual motion. Our perspective is changing as we move but we orient to something outside ourselves, the sun, and say that it is the one changing.

It’s easy to lose perspective on what’s changing when we’re grappling with our umbrellas.  

You’re not only moving through space, you’re moving through time as well. Generations come and go. Sure, change is happening to you, but often you’re the agent of change, you’re the one turning the machinery of your life. You may not see it because it is so gradual

I get that people hire good coaches to provide systems, teach things and solve problems for concrete pain points, but truly great coaching, transformational coaching, is more about an abstract pain point, it’s about helping you see the bigger patterns, helping you see an accurate picture of yourself, of what’s changing and what isn’t, what you want to change, what you can control and what you can’t. Sometimes it really is the wind. Other times, you’ve gradually turned and faced a different direction without even recognizing it, thinking you’re going north. And perhaps you generally are, but you still can’t figure out what the problem is with your danged umbrella.

Hey. Maybe it isn’t the wind shifting. Maybe you’re the one who moved. It’s 2021 now and the wind’s still blowing. What direction are you headed?