Change is the nature of the Tao – this is
what Lao Tzu says. But he says it because he
knows that we fear change – humans are terrified
of it. I don’t mean that there aren’t any
exceptions – cool, fast living futurist extropian
types who at least aver that change is their way,
too. David Bowie, also. But I do
mean to suggest that most of us get comfortable even in
situations where we shouldn’t be comfortable,
and most of us loathe leaving them.
There are plenty of good reasons for humans
to fear change. We are small, scrawny
creatures that survive by our wits. Take
away our technology and our brains, and we will be
chased down by cheetahs. We’ve had tens
of thousands of years of evolution (at least) to favor
social norms and biological preferences for staying
put, establishing home and hearth, stability.
Those extropian cavemen who wanted to go out
and see the world – they were probably eaten.
And so, the rest of them created us.
Of course, too much fear couldn’t have been
evolutionarily desirable either – those people
starved. So, somewhere in the middle.
Change, as the Greeks well knew, is also
a form of death – of passing from one form into
another. This puzzled the early philosophers.
How can a thing undergo change and still be said
to be the same thing it once was? An ice
cube melts into water – what principle is it that makes
this water the same as ice? And what principles
differentiate it? More importantly, what is
permanent, and what transitory?
This is, it would seem, the last Dabbler.
The column is continuing, as the ‘Ideas’ column
in a new monthly magazine entitled Zeek,
which I’m editing. But the column-as-Dabbler, as
personal essays read by a few friends and websurfers,
is growing into something a little more
‘real,’ with more structure and focus.
Some things about the column will change, and other
things will stay more or less the same.
As I write this Last Dabbler column, my
apartment is beginning to get filled up with
boxes, ready to cart my belongings upstairs to
a larger, duplex apartment with a great little roof
deck and more space for me to set up a real office
and recording studio. A change for the better,
it would seem, but terrifying nonetheless.
The financial obligations the place represents seem to
be the classic anti-Thoreau: complicate, complicate.
My current place is adequate, I am more or
less content with it – why move? Why walk
up the extra flights of stairs, deal with the hassle
and dislocation of address changes, pay all that
money out the door?
Big changes – marriage, kids – always seem
a bit unreal as they happen, because they are
not really happening to us. The “us” is
what is changing. If change were like a movie, or an
amusement park ride, it would not be so dislocating;
we would watch it unfold from a safe
distance. But change changes us, and there
is no vantage point from which to observe it. The
future is like a white fog of nothing.
This year, I had my brain injured in a car
accident; I was dumped by my girlfriend of
fourteen months; I quit my job at a company I
founded, frustrated with one of my partners and
the economy and the whole enterprise of postponing
what I most wanted to do. I lost so much,
including my emotional crutch/getaway at the
summer camp where I used to work, that I drafted
my suicide note. Change seemed too literally
like death. But having wrecked the old life, or
having parts of it wrecked for me, I started
to create a new one. I traveled to Maine, where I had
to confront my fear of heights on a mountain
ridge; to Belize and Guatemala, where I learned
how to operate in a new culture and traveled
beautiful forests and islands and ruins; and to
Burning Man, where I blew out a few circuits
in my mind, danced by fires, and alternated
between orgiastic nights and days contemplating
the desert. I became a writer full-time, started
up Zeek, started a rock
band, which is playing around NYC these days. My personal solo
music
project, Minnow,
is starting to get gigs on its own too. I came out as bisexual to just
about the
last few friends who didn’t know already. I’m
turning Metatronics, my media platform, into a
real New York corporation with budgets and bylaws.
I’m leaving my job teaching Sunday
school, because I’m just not a Sunday school
teacher anymore. I’m taking voice lessons,
applying to writing programs, hustling for freelance
gigs, pushing the novel, seeing a shrink,
working on guitar-techno projects when I get
the time. I’m maintaining my religious and
spiritual practices while changing the communities
in which I practice them. And I’m moving to
a new apartment that, to me, makes me feel thirty.
And for a change, that’s how I want to feel.
Oh, and at around the same time, the world
changed too. Though in its case, I’m not sure
it’s for the better.
Often we hold onto ghosts of old lives longer
than we should. They are comfortable, and
change is hard. One might say I should
lower my standards – or to put it more possibly, be
happier with what I have. This is wisdom,
I admit. But the argument on the other side is
compelling also: growth, change, new perspectives,
new horizons. Which is right? I don’t yet
know.
I think the key has to be finding some sort
of dynamic balance between causing change
and rolling with it. The Taoist leader,
again according to Lao Tzu, is he who is able to recognize
the patterns of change coming, adapt to them,
and seize the opportunities presented by them to
transform his world. (The Taoist sage is
probably just staying out of the way of such things.) I
understand why surfers become sort of amateur
Taoists. It’s a little like that – opportunities shift,
and the way to succeed is neither passivity nor
activity but an attention to the shifting poles of
each in the world and the self, and the courage
to act accordingly.
So, goodbye 2001, and goodbye to my home.
Goodbye also to the Dabbler: your new incarnation
is coming.
Jay Michaelson
December 20, 2001
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