Photo by Damir Omerović on Unsplash
Most people come to my therapy practice because they want to make a change in their life. They yearn for things to be different. But they are also worried they’re too busy to do the work.
Often, there’s an unacknowledged wish that if they just come to the sessions, the change will happen on its own.
In our conversations, they’ll swing from their intense desire for transformation to their certainty that they’ll fail. Their fear of failure, and their anticipation of the humiliation and self-loathing that will follow, keeps them from trying.
I get it. I have the same struggles. I’ve noticed the more stuck I feel, the more I tell myself I have to throw myself at the problem with gusto—it’s going to take massive effort, because I’ve failed so many times before.
One thing I’ve found is that, paradoxically, the passionate desire for change can be an impediment to success. It’s the passion that drives the urgency. The feeling of urgency makes us think a problem has to be solved immediately. The change has to be fast, and enormous.
I need to quit my job to start this small business I’ve dreamed of creating.
I need to divorce my spouse, because our chronic fighting is turning me into a disfigured version of myself.
I need to radically change my diet and sign up for this expensive exercise program, because I’m terrified I’m going to have a heart attack and die young, like my parent did.
We hope that if our passionate desire for change is matched by grand actions, then people we love will know we’re serious. They’ll be on our side. They won’t criticize us for having these dreams and goals. They’ll stop demanding things from us, because we’re busy creating change.
In fact, the way to make change is the opposite of all of this.
We get stuck because there’s no clear path between the current state and the desired state. If we can’t see the path, all we see is the gap between now and then, and the surge of energy we think we need to get there. No wonder we think we have to make a dramatic change, or muster every last calorie to meet our goal.
I think this is the lure of “boot camp” approaches to change, and the belief that the more we behave like a drill sergeant, the better we will perform. In fact, what we know is that encouragement and celebration are far more likely to lead to actual, sustained change than punishment and threat.
The way to make deep, lasting change is to be as boring as possible.
No flair. You sneak up on the change, like a cat stalking its prey. You tell no one you’re doing it. You waste no time asking others for their advice about your goal. You devote your planning and thinking not to the end result, but rather to the smallest possible action you can take. You make the first step so absurdly small, so trivial, that it’s laughable that you would call that a step towards change.
Resistance is futile when we ask ourselves to do something for ten to fifteen minutes, once or twice a week. And that’s when we are actually going to change.
It takes a lot of thinking and experimentation to figure out that first step towards tackling a big goal. The first step has to be ten times smaller than you think it is, or you’ll waste all your energy with the urgency and the drama and the talking and the processing, and the change won’t happen, because you’ll have exhausted yourself with the idea of the change.
I’m starting today’s post by talking about individual change, because it’s a good way “in” to the question of how to take action to challenge the violence that’s happening all around us, and to combat the oppression that’s inside us, as a result of the structures that shape our world.
The goals we make as individuals feel tangible, even if they’re lofty. But when we consider our capacity and ability to contribute to change at the level of the social and political, suddenly our field of vision expands. What we are trying to change is larger and harder to break into small pieces.
But those feelings of desperation for things to be different, and the urgency and focus on the end goal that happen when we think about our own lives, are also happening at the level of the collective. We see it in the way social problems are reported in the media. We hear about how violent our society is, how many are suffering and dying. We watch videos of people crying out in pain and devastation. We are flooded with traumatic material, as if being emotionally flooded is going to compel us to act. Invariably, it has the opposite effect.
What we don’t hear a lot about is those first steps; the first changes that are needed on the pathway to change. We don’t need the entire path to start addressing a complex social problem: we just need to figure out our own first step, our contribution, and then devote some time to making that change.
People often tell me they “aren’t an activist” and so they can’t make a difference. I imagine when they say the word “activist,” they’re picturing a protestor, standing up to the police, or a person testifying before a governmental committee.
Or maybe they’re thinking an activist is someone who devotes all their time outside of work to going to meetings and conferences, hanging out with other activists, in a special community with a lot of rules and expectations and morals and judgements.
Or maybe they think activists have a single-minded devotion to the cause, and they aren’t a “real” activist because they want to have a balanced life, and do things that bring them joy.
Sometimes people tell me they have “nothing to offer” because they don’t have the right skills. They’d have to spend a lot of time becoming more knowledgable about the thing they care about, so other people won’t think they're a joke.
Plus, they don’t like public speaking. They don’t know which issue to get behind because there are so many problems. They don’t want to be depressed. They don’t want to work really hard and fail and be let down. They aren’t cool enough, or brave enough, or young enough, or marginalized enough, to be part of the change.
My friends—if you have said, or are saying any of the above, I introduce you to:
The mushroom.
(And here’s where you must imagine some kind of soaring music, and a picture of a humble mushroom, just sitting there, being its mushroom self.)
To be more precise, what I really want you to envision is the mycelium network, the source of all mushrooms, and of so many other things. And to introduce you to the mycelium network, I present you the RadioLab podcast From Tree to Shining Tree which describes what it is, how it works, and why it is the key to how the trees in a forest communicate with one another.
Please listen to the podcast, because when I listened to this podcast, it changed the way I look at forests. It changed the way I ask questions. It made me love systems thinking even more, because systems are the fundamental organizing principle of the natural world.
It also fundamentally changed the way I thought about information, and organizing, and mutual aid.
So much of the actual history of organizing is suppressed from public education, because if everyone knew how ordinary and messy and unplanned actual organizing is, those in power wouldn’t be so secure. It’s incredibly powerful to understand how the most significant changes in history really happened. (For a great example, you might want to read Taylor Branch’s King series, the trilogy of books that traces in great detail the unplanned, extraordinary, colossal effort that turned into the Civil Rights movement.) Instead, we get told stories of heroes, and grand battles, and amazing protests with thousands in attendance, and we can be forgiven for thinking well, that’s not me.
I draw on the mycelium, personally, any time I catch myself falling for the white supremacist myth that to be a part of the change, you have to be exceptional and stand out as an individual. You have to have “something to offer”: meaning you have to have an answer, you have to be an expert, you have to be a hero and lead everyone else. Most of all, you have to be something other than your own, ordinary, actual self.
These depictions of movement work depend on the idea of the lone individual, leading and inspiring a mass of people who depend on the leader to tell them what to do. These stories undermine the fact that a mass movement is an entity in itself, beyond the power and ideas of any particular individual.
There are massive trees, but the tree is not the forest. The forest is a super organism. It is connected by the mycelium, which looks like a brain and operates as a neural network. The mass movement is the forest intelligence: it is the product of the network, the feedback loops, the perpetual communication streams.
What would it be like to think of activism as a kind of mycelium network, a super organism, matching in its structure the complexity and networked aspects of ideological constructions like patriarchy and white supremacy? How could a movement shift and adapt to current conditions, the way the ideologies of patriarchy and white supremacy constantly shape-shift to contain the political threats to their power? What if you saw yourself as a tiny, hairlike thread, one singular component of a vast web of change-making?
Then, what your current skills, interests, particular obsessions and talents—what you already have, who you already are—would be of vast importance to the networked whole.
If all you had to be was one tiny thread, what would you do?
To make change, emulate a mushroom