Flex_ Do Something Different - Ben [28]
find it a bit uncomfortable because your comfort zone of behaviours is their comfort zone too.
Friends have an investment in you staying the way you are, even if this is not in either your best interests or theirs. I remember a very good friend of mine being annoyed at me for breaking up my relationship with my partner at that time. Initially I thought his reaction was because he believed I was being unkind to her, or perhaps he thought I was making a mistake. In fact it turned out that the real reason for his annoyance was that it would cause disruption to his life. We would no longer be a foursome who could go on those holidays and evenings out that he found so enjoyable. Similarly, a student we know decided to become vegetarian. Her family and friends might have respected her decision or even admired her for taking a stand and adhering to her principles. But her parents complained about the fact that she wouldn’t be eating the same food as them and one or two friends were upset when she would no longer join them for a burger after a night out. People may not want you to change. Beware of those who have their own interests at heart rather than yours, despite what they may say.
Our new behaviours might have all sorts of ripple effects that we hadn’t anticipated. If we want to learn to flex for our own good we need to take account of the reactions of others so that we neither misinterpret them nor get put off.
38. Does a leopard change its spots?
flex does not erode personality; it enlarges it. Of course, some of the natural tendencies we have will remain for all sorts of reasons. They might be partially genetic, or particularly useful; they may be supported by our partner, our friends, and our family; and they may be kept in place partly by the demands of work and the context in which we live. A duchess in a stately home and a single mother working on the supermarket checkout undoubtedly inhabit completely different worlds. Each contains inbuilt habit requirements that are compatible with living successfully in those respective worlds. Individual natural tendencies and circumstances do shape each of us in the same way that the leopard’s spots do. But just as a leopard does not require its particular pattern of spots, neither do we need to hold on to our particular habits of thinking and behaviour.
Years ago Karen sent me a passage from a letter written by Rainer Maria Rilke to a young poet who had asked him for advice. It encapsulates beautifully the notion of life having endless possibilities if we are awake to them:
For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in Poe’s stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against