Think about the world barely five-hundred years ago.
We believed we came into this world as two fully-fleshed adults around 4000 BC. The sun circled our earth. Basic laws of physics like inertia were still to be discovered. As was calculus. Books were just beginning to be printed after centuries of being copied by hand and kept locked in monasteries, any disease was treated by blood-letting, and we believed that if we rowed too far we would fall off the edge of the earth. (Okay, some people still believe that one but you can’t please them all.)
I am citing here the beliefs held in Europe at that time, but the rest of the world was not very far ahead. And it was in Europe of course that the spark of the scientific revolution was lit, that defines the world we live in today.
But it took nearly two millennia for Euclid’s geometry to progress to Newton’s calculus. And even within this later revolution, more than a century separates Copernicus’ heliocentric theory from Newton’s three laws. The complete overhauling of our knowledge of the world thus began excruciatingly slow and was full of setbacks and self-doubt. Copernicus in fact delayed publishing his work for over 30 years because as a churchman himself he was too racked by doubts!
And yet the world changed. One by one, all long-held beliefs were challenged and most fell. The world we have inherited today, is like that Ship of Theseus where every original plank has been substituted with a new one.
But this is the point: Copernicus could no see as far as Newton, and Newton not as far as Einstein. Similarly, between Kant and Foucault, lie several philosophers. And so even the greatest minds can see only a little ahead of the knowledge of their time, and this is where they work from. Changing one thesis at a time. Or to extend the analogy with Ship of Theseus, one plank at a time.
This is how any change begins. Slowly and nearly invisibly. Whether it be this greatest revolution of our time, or that inner transformation we are struggling to put.
For a long time, we see minuscule progress when we are impatient for an instant makeover. And yet, if we have the strength to persevere, we will wake up one day in the future and realise how far we have come from where we started with.
For there cannot be a makeover without these incremental shifts of vision. All the self-help books that promise overnight transformation, all the advertisements seducing us – they are lying. For the shift we are looking for happens not outside us but within.
It is not our circumstances that have to change, but us. We have to begin questioning the beliefs we took as self-evident, and we all know how difficult that is. It is like shaking the very ground one stands upon.
To state my own case, for a long time I was ridden by anxiety of failure. To the point that I would be physically assailed by the most painful ulcers when I was stressed. But slowly I realised that it was not my circumstances that were driving my anxieties, but my most basic fears and shame. I began to work on these core beliefs I held, questioning them when a ‘catastrophe’ hit, asking myself what is the worst that can really happen. The shift in my responses were only gradual, for going against our past conditioning is like trying to wade against a very powerful current, but slowly – inch by inch – I began to shift. I am still not where I want to be, and I will perhaps never reach that ideal, but I know how far I have come and quite pleased with that.
I remember the terror every time I ventured into something new. Quitting at thirty-three with little savings and no plan other than to read and write for the next few years. Interviewing a stranger, asking him to revisit a harrowing tragedy. Stepping in to alone conduct a workshop of 30 young cynical men. Climbing a vertical glacier with pick-axes at the age of forty-five. And most of all, exposing myself to the disapproval of others after a lifetime of shining as the ‘high-achiever’.
But I persisted, through far more failures than successes. And the shifts began to slowly fall in, tiny incremental steps. And with every shift, my horizon expanded. Things I feared turned out to be not that frightening after all. I could now progress to the next level, in gaming terminology. My worldview changed so many times over that I no longer believe in the totality of any knowledge or opinion I hold now, realising its limits.
Many, many more shifts await me. But I know now I would not see them manifest in me for a long time. And I also know that is all right. For I know, deep down within me, something is happening.
An example I have witnessed was this fifty-year old lady who joined my yoga class, very out of shape in the beginning and taking months before she could touch her shins bending forward. But by the end of the year, she was reaching her ankles.
For a transformation is never in a flash, it inches forward – and then rushes ahead when the momentum has built up. In neurobiology, the longest wait happens when the brain is rewiring itself to new pathways of thinking.
So if you feel frustrated then with your very slow progress in whatever you are trying to change in you, remember Copernicus. One of the greatest mathematicians of all times, struggling to overturn the foundational worldview of his time with only the basic math of his time as his tool – and withholding his discovery for thirty years from the world.
Even if that’s how long it takes for you to reach somewhere, it’s worth many times more than staying where you are right now. A place you no longer believe in, but are still to discover its alternative.
To quote Martin Luther King – “If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run walk, if you can’t walk crawl, but by all means keep moving.”
The journey is the transformation.
