Enjoying creative change

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I want to say something about change. Is it worth all the effort? That’s what I asked myself some years ago
This is what happened. How I began to argue the case to myself. If I saw something wrong with animal farming I would have to pull out all stops to do something about it, and first up I’d have to stop supporting it. When I found out what was happening to animals on farms I suddenly I saw the need to change a whole heap of food habits. Already a vegetarian, now I saw there’d be no more eggs, no more milk or cheese or anything with milk in it, otherwise I’d be supporting something I didn’t agree with. That would mean an enormous change.
I liked all those foods. I’d been raised on cream cakes, chocolate and yoghurt and a million other yummy products. Most meals were made tasty with cheesy or creamy additions. For an adult deciding to no longer eat all these familiar foods, that would be quite a change. It would have been better if all this had been fixed up when I was much younger. I hadn’t realised how addicted to all these foods I’d become. Mars Bars – how could I live without them? I did change. It was a long time ago.
Recently I suggested to a friend who was putting on weight that he might consider changing some of his eating habits. “It’s a bit late now” … and I heard this from a 25 year old! Already he weighed too heavily, but already in his own mind his habits were too fixed.
The great advantage I had had was that my change was sparked by ethics – I had an ethical reason for change, not a cosmetic one. I was concerned for the animals. My friend was more concerned by the bathroom scales.
He reckoned that the effort needed to change was greater than the results he expected to get for all his efforts. In his case it meant giving up favourite foods, it meant problems socially when eating out. There was a long term health issue too. If he failed to change it would show up his lack of resolve. And even then it is quite likely that he underestimated the scale of change needed to lose weight. For me too, change was daunting. But I had inspiration on my side. I was standing up for a principle, to uphold an ethic, to take on a great challenge. For him it was just about weight and maybe his overall health, for me it was all positive, passionate and to do with how I wanted to be.
But the process of change, for whatever reason, tests our resolve. At whatever age we try to change, it can improve things, but often it’s too little and we expect too much too soon. There’s a whole unreality about how change works. With food habits being changed, from omnivore to vegan, if we do leave it to adulthood it feels like one great uphill struggle. There’s a lot of undoing to ‘do’, a lot of replacing foods. There’s the impact on routines of lifestyle including our social life, where we are used to eating with others, what others eat.
To counteract the difficulty we might do a ‘go-mad’ change, that is a change that’s so radical that we don’t stand a chance of keeping it up. Because we regard self development as a competitive sport, success becomes important - it kills the actual enjoyment of change. We never feel the full sense of achievement, especially if we do succeed by sheer willpower.
There’s so much competing going on in every field, not just over diet - we race against each other to be more special, more wealthy, more well known, more revered, and so on. We’d like to think that the process of change could be enjoyable but instead we believe it is just a matter of teeth-grindingly hard self discipline. If that can be turned around we stand a chance to change and not be traumatised by the difficulty of it.
Change keeps us creative and on our toes. It gives life edge. The best change always recognises mistakes and misjudgements, and lets us be less judgemental and more forgiving of ourselves and others. If ‘creative change’ is our best teacher it teaches us patience, enough to appreciate even our smallest movements forward. It lets us never take ourselves too seriously or grieve over mistakes or backslidings. Change and creativity energise us whether we succeed or fail. If we are capable of embarking on a course of change, especially one that is based on ethical principle, and if we can get into the habit of making-change, we’ll get more used to the reality of experiencing Life’s biggest events. We’ll feel the satisfaction of true self development.