Change is Hard

Read on for more unique, inspiring and never-before-heard insights! 

Change is hard. A few years ago, I could feel stress eating at me. My freelance business had dwindled to the point of having to pivot and take a full-time job; my new client at that job was nuts; my wife and I were planning to move across the country from Portland back to Minneapolis while attempting to simultaneously buy a house; there was still a global pandemic going on, I think. I like structure. Crave it, even. When things are out of order and unpredictable—like soaring mortgage interest rates, constant late-evening feedback, or my desk lamp being slightly askew as I write this—my anxiety goes from white noise to EDM. When that happens, I become less enjoyable to be around, let alone live with. So, I started to meditate every morning.

On Mindfulness

This short daily break to distance myself from the volatility I was experiencing and focus on breathing, presence and mindfulness changed how I approached my emotional state. By creating a peaceful, static, constant and controllable respite in a sea of chaos, I could more appropriately function in polite society.

At around the same time, I had begun increasing my average trail running mileage. This was not an attempt at stress relief in and of itself—I simply liked running and wanted to run more, to go further, to push myself. In the Pacific Northwest, I run all year, rain or shine, scalding or frigid, bright or pitch black. I typically am out by myself (or with my dog) and have gotten into a few sketchy situations, been in my fair share of absolutely heinous weather and never really have a plan other than “run.” You might be reading this wondering why someone who can’t handle misaligned office supplies would deign to put himself in more or less uncontrollable situations. And for the answer, let’s go back about 1,000 years.

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Into the Past

Hey! You make it here okay? Great. When author and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass, 2013) attempted to learn the Ojibwe language—closely related to that of her own Potawatomi ancestors—she described it as “…cumbersome…impossible…and more than that, it’s all wrong.” Take a linguistic look at the thousand-year-old indigenous dialect, and you’ll probably agree with her. In short, whereas a language like English is composed of about 70% nouns, Ojibwe and many other Native American languages build their lexicon upon nearly 70% verbs. What’s the difference? When you have that many verbs, they also need to be conjugated. Like, a lot. So, as a novice speaker, Robin had to retain all that using the limited resources of an unfortunately literally dying language. But it wasn’t so much making flash cards that stumped her, as the semantic logic. Things we inherently categorize and refer to as nouns, Ojibwe refer to as verbs, in a state of action or being. For example, their word for “bay” is the infinitive “to be a bay.” But isn’t it just a bay? How can something constantly be a bay, or a mountain, or a forest or a day of the week? Well, depends on how you look at it. 

A forest isn’t stagnant: the trees are growing, birds live in those trees, worms in the soil, clouds move above it, the whole place changes throughout the season, even throughout one day. The forest you set foot in at a particular time will only be this way during that particular moment. The forest is not a noun at all. The forest is a verb.

In the 13th century—and for the sake of poeticism, let’s say at the same time the Ojibwe were figuring out their verby language—the Japanese Zen Buddhist monk Dogen (Shōbōgenzō, ~1200 AD) penned an idea of his own. He said, “Mountains are time. Oceans are time. If they were not time, there would be no mountains or oceans.”

If you’re keeping score at home, two distinct civilizations on opposite sides of the planet were essentially saying the same thing at the same time, about not only the animacy of grammar but our entire world. Things aren’t here to be constant. As a matter of fact things aren’t even things at all. And once you start thinking about nature this way, its impact on yourself and your place in the world is very different.

Changing Perspectives

I can’t pinpoint when it happened, but I remember starting to feel the same at the end of a run as at the end of a meditation. These adventures I was taking, these labyrinthine lacunae apart from the world, my commitments, my stresses, my everyday life, began to change my well-being. And they continue to. When I run, I am captivated by change. Immersed in change. Crave it, even. But I’m not running through turbulent, neverending, chaotic metamorphosis. I’m in one fleeting, successive moment after another, constantly moving forward. The forest is a verb. And I find solace in that. I don’t do my morning meditation as much or with the sheer religiosity I used to anymore—or maybe I do. Change is hard. 

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