let change dawn on you
New Year's Day, I remember standing on the stony shore of Lake Ontario. Breath steaming in the cold and bright afternoon air. Wind whipping across the choppy water, freezing all feeling from my face. Staring out blankly. Taking in everything and nothing at once.
I remember knowing, for the first time, I was turning to a new chapter. The end of my world traveling, backpack dwelling, post-grad phase, and the beginning of something else. Something different. Something that involved Canada, the outdoors. Planting roots. Staying put.
Looking back, I'm struck by how long it took for this change to happen. How long it lived in me before I became conscious of it. And longer still before it will be brought into being.
I was writing about planting roots a year ago, but my thinking about home and belonging was blurry back then. I still had another year of traveling ahead. Old programming I was still running on. Old dreams to get out of my system. While my mind was cast into the heavens of the future.
This is, I think, how change happens:
At first, it exists in this dreamlike, hazy form. In the subtlest of sensations. Completely free the clumsy confines of words. There was a quiet yet desperate dissatisfaction from the rootlessness of my life that I knew in my heart, but not in my head.
Then, the change shows through symbols. I discovered people who had moved closer to nature, built a home, started a family. By serendipity or sheer coincidence, I found philosophers like Chesterton and Weil that spoke to the need for roots and the necessity of commitment. I discovered role models like Simon Sarris and Henrik Karlsson that partially embodied my ideal, helped etch out its edges. I was transfixed, but couldn’t explain why.
Each interaction with the information soaked world improved the image, refined the resolution1.
Over many mornings of coffee and contemplation, and many evenings of quiet conversation, the intimate intuition began to shape into a creeping conviction.
And finally, after rolling the change around in my head long enough, it turned into a smooth marble. First a timid, outstretched hope. Then a decision. Solidified in my soul. Articulated in words that filled my journal and left my lips2. Supported by the felt sense that failing to change, despite my fear, would be a squandering of life.
Of course, for dreams to be brought to fruition, the soul must make demands of the body3. But the next step becomes not only necessary, but natural. Close in. As if it was there, waiting. In front of me, all along. And I know it’s right because not doing it would feel profoundly wrong4.
Through all these stages, it's almost as if the change you must make is trying its best to reach you. To show itself. Inch by inch, working it way up from the depths of the unconscious5.
It's almost as if your full potential, what you could be in the future, beckons to you in the present. As the voice of intuition. This instinct of self-realization. And guides you toward the changes you must make, to bring itself into being.
Perhaps where the unconscious meets the conscious is where your potential you meets the present you6. Where eternity touches time.
In a modern age that sells fast change, in two-day psychedelic ceremonies and 200-page self help books, TikToks that peddle the toxic temptation to cut out all the people in your life, retreat into a cocoon of morning meditations and positive affirmations, to emerge a healed, actualized, and abundance-graced butterfly, real change, I think, is much subtler and softer. More like drifting on a lake, not realizing you've moved until you look back at the shore, than plunging headfirst down raging river rapids.
Real change is an unspoken process. A metamorphosis that is measured and slow. Working within at all times. A long, unsexy, and sometimes arduous slog.
Real change is not a bolt of lightning. It is a bridge built to a new horizon, brick by brick, day by day, with effort and love. It takes time. It demands time. To go from a dream to a confession; a confession to something embodied, acted on7.
To embrace real change is to surrender to slowness. To let it work on you and through you.
Even the big changes that blow your life up—ending a long-term relationship or quitting a job—are always the result of many months of mounting dissatisfaction and disillusionment8. The manifestation of a deep knowing that you act out, even if you don't fully understand why.
Even the required freefalls and leaps of faith, things you can never be "ready" for—writing a book or moving to a new city, getting married or having children—feel familiar, even friendly. It's not that you become less afraid, but you become more courageous. And that's a big difference.
I'm not advocating for passivity, but patience. Patience with all that rages and roars in your heart. Patience for the budding change that isn't yet ready to bloom.
This process, the process of becoming, is accelerated by attention and delayed by distraction.
People can go on sleepwalking through their lives for a long time. Blind to the self that's desperately trying to come into being. Deaf to the cries for change. This paralysis is a product of distraction, drowning out intuition.
Attention, real attention, doesn't tolerate apathy. Attention is the birthplace of agency. And agency is the engine of change.
To live romantically is to let change dawn on you.
Not hurrying but not pausing either.
As always,
Last week, I shared 24 of my favorite quotes with patrons. The best way to support me and my writing, is by taking out a paid membership:
And thank you to everyone who has been generous enough to buy me a coffee. Each morning, I restart the wood stove that heats our cottage and sit by the fire, calmly, with a black coffee, for an hour or so.
👋 what i’ve been up to:
I spent my last week in Newfoundland and, after a lovely two month stay, headed back home to Ontario. It's sad to say goodbye to summer but all good things must end.
Each change in location, each turn of the seasons, brings new priorities. I've returned to running, my regular reading routine, and have a few Fall projects planned to prepare for Winter. First up: building a wood shed.
✍️ quote i’m pondering:
“If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.”
― Thomas Merton
📸 photos i took:
August in Newfoundland.
When Michelangelo was asked how he carved the statue of David, he answered: "It's simple. I just chipped away everything didn’t look like David."
Perhaps we learn what is for us by repeatedly learning what is not for us. The path of “not here”.
Only here, by this point, did I really figure out what I was up to all along.
This phrase came out of a conversation with a friend and theologian about Meister Eckhart's sermons, but I think Simon Sarris has written something similar.
In The Hero’s Journey, after hearing the Call to Adventure, the next and natural step is the Refusal of the Call. The hero tries to shrink from their fate, what they know they must do. But eventually, realizes they must answer the call. A complete refusal results in a sad, regretful life that is entirely too small for them.
Through dreams and symbols, books you somehow stumble upon, people you meet. All march in a splendidly uniform procession. Pointing toward this change. Guiding you along.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― C.G. Jung
Even more internal things, like becoming more calm and less anxious, has been a slow and arduous slog, where I’ve had to work and wait. Learn and iterate. Earn every inch.
Despite the feeling of disequilibrium that follows—life feeling awfully alien and uncomfortable and unfamiliar—with time, it tends to motivate a shift to a new, better equilibrium.
Your description of change as a gradual, infinitesimal process is aligned with the nature of all things. To survive, we must filter and compartmentalize our experiences, so a change appears to some at the eleventh hour. Your wise and patient perspective is wonderful.
Tommy, I loved this sentence:
“Supported by the felt sense that failing to change, despite my fear, would be a squandering of life.”
What is the cost of inaction? Of failing to change? The life that is only ours to live and fully occupy.
Thank you for all of the profound perspectives in this piece.