Dealing with Change

Riding the Waves of Impermanence

Why Do So Many People Resist Change, Even Change for the Good?

There is a wonderful little story about two monks who lived together in a monastery for many years; they were great friends. Then they died within a few months of one another. One of them got reborn in the heaven realms, the other monk got reborn as a worm in a dung pile. The one up in the heaven realms was having a wonderful time, enjoying all the heavenly pleasures. But he started thinking about his friend, “I wonder where my old mate has gone?” So he scanned all of the heaven realms, but could not find a trace of his friend. Then he scanned the realm of human beings, but he could not see any trace of his friend there, so he looked in the realm of animals and then of insects. Finally he found him, reborn as a worm in a dung pile … Wow! He thought: “I am going to help my friend. I am going to go down there to that dung pile and take him up to the heavenly realm so he too can enjoy the heavenly pleasures and bliss of living in these wonderful realms.”

So he went down to the dung pile and called his mate. And the little worm wriggled out and said: “Who are you?” “I am your friend. We used to be monks together in a past life, and I have come up to take you to the heaven realms where life is wonderful and blissful.” But the worm said: “Go away, get lost!” “But I am your friend, and I live in the heaven realms,” and he described the heaven realms to him. But the worm said: “No thank you, I am quite happy here in my dung pile. Please go away.” Then the heavenly being thought: “Well if I could only just grab hold of him and take him up to the heaven realms, he could see for himself.” So he grabbed hold of the worm and started tugging at him; and the harder he tugged, the harder that worm clung to his pile of dung.

—Ajahn Brahm, Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?¹

WE FEAR CHANGE when we assume that change will be for the worse. We are more driven by fear of loss than by the promise of gain. Together, these traits produce our resistance to change. We feel that even if our current situation isn’t perfect, it’s familiar and predictable. And there’s comfort in that.

But trouble comes when we resist opportunities due to this fear, when we resist despite good reasons to believe that change will be for the better. Well-meaning bosses or coworkers push us to accept change. They insist harder. We resist harder.

Understanding this about ourselves helps us to be compassionate with those who cling to the old and familiar while resisting the new and unknown. At one time or another, we have all been the worm, comfy in his warm, fragrant pile of shit, ignorant of what life has to offer, afraid to take a chance. As we forgive this in ourselves, we need to forgive it in others. Let your friends and coworkers be. They will change when they can. In the meantime, the best way to convince them that a change is good is to show how you yourself benefit when you let change happen. This adds new meaning to the well-known spiritual dictum: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

How Does a Buddha Face Anxiety, Fear, and Stress?

Everything together falls apart.
Everything rising up collapses.
Every meeting ends in parting.
Every life ends in death.

—Udanavarga

WE’VE MENTIONED IMPERMANENCE as one of the core tenets of Buddhism. Everything falls apart. A corollary of impermanence is anatta (literally, “no-self”). All we value and care for, even our very self, is impermanent. We arise and we pass away, along with everything we love. There is no stopping this process. In the face of this, how do we feel?

Most of us feel anxiety, fear, and stress. Few of us can look directly into the face of change. The less control we have, the tighter we cling to the people, places, and things we are attached to. We worry about losing our jobs and money; our anxiety causes us to lose sleep, become irritable with our loved ones, and stress out over things we cannot now control, and later cannot stop.

Buddha knows. He once was where we are now. He saw the processes he described in the Udanavarga quote. He knew the worry, fear, anxiety, and stress that people experience. He knew that those processes are not what causes those feelings. He understood that it is our failure to understand the true nature of existence and impermanence that causes our pain and distress.

We want desperately to control the world around us, but the harder we try, the more upset we get as we refuse to accept that we can’t control much of anything. We seek to find solid ground—in the form of secure jobs, money in the bank, loved ones who will never let us down or leave us, and so on. We are driven by fear as we search for something or someone to keep us safe and secure. But our efforts are futile. Sooner or later, we all discover that there is no place on the map called Safe. Contemporary Buddhist teacher Stephen Batchelor strongly warns against our attachment to place. We stand on a groundless ground. He is right: peace and serenity cannot be found and preserved anyplace: no job, no bank account, no family, no heart.

Peace lies in every moment; you must find it there. Your only job security is your ability to secure a job. Your emotional and spiritual well-being is a function of your relationship with yourself, including your ongoing dissolution. Ultimately, we gain neither happiness nor peace. When we really accept this, we open to the peace available to us in every moment.

How Should a Mindful Person Respond to Losing a Job?

That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and impermanent, is the first mark of existence. It is the ordinary state of affairs. Everything is in process. Everything—every tree, every blade of grass, all the animals, insects, human beings, buildings, the animate and the inanimate—is always changing, moment to moment.

—Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You²

EVERY BUDDHIST TEACHER, every sutra, every new Buddhist book, keeps relentlessly turning back to this central truth of anicca, impermanence. And it’s as true at work as anywhere. There isn’t a job on this planet that can’t be—no, better, that won’t be—outsourced, eliminated, changed, downsized, or abolished. Some are put on hold; others are gone for good. Some disappear to other countries; others vanish into thin air.

Of course, new jobs arise as old jobs vanish, but this may offer little consolation, as the new ones require different skills, knowledge, and aptitude than the old. For many of us, the world of work is a giant game of musical chairs: we go around and around until the music stops, we reach for the nearest chair, and it’s been removed.

When you’ve lost your chair, here is what the Buddha says:

1. Don’t take it personally. All jobs are impermanent. Your job is not “yours” or anybody’s. It arose according to conditions that had nothing to do with you, and it passes away when conditions change.

2. Go sit down where the love is. Surround yourself with friends and family who will support and encourage you in this tough time. And do it for yourself. When Buddhists do metta practice, sending benevolence to the world, they begin with themselves.

3. Draw on spiritual resources to get you through the pain of losing a job. Meditate, pray, read inspirational literature, find spiritual teachers, join a spiritual community, spend time in nature, listen to or play music, journal about your feelings. Teachers and traditions have been laying up these treasures for you for four thousand years. You have free time now; this is your chance to dig in!

4. Remember, just as jobs pass away, so does joblessness. Impermanence can also be your friend. Along with that old job, let go of your job assumptions, your job limitations, your job preconditions. Make those impermanent, too. Now you’re open, ready to respond when the music plays again.

Does the Buddha Have Any Wisdom about Changing Careers?

“Nothing really dies,” I told him. “It just turns into something else. Everything is always changing form. Do you remember the pumpkin that rotted into the earth in your garden? Tomatoes sprouted where it used to be. This bird will go back to the earth and turn into lavender flowers and butterflies.”

—Anne Cushman, “What Is Death, Mommy?”
in The Best Buddhist Writing 2006³

THE BUDDHA CHANGED career in major ways three times before hitting on something that stuck. And those changes were seriously downwardly mobile. In his first career, he was heir apparent to the family business: running a fiefdom of the Kosalan kingdom. Sweet set-up. And the myths make it sweeter: protected from all dukkha in his various palaces and gardens, the best at everything he tried. He was one of those wonder boys who bosses go gaga for; he couldn’t do wrong.

But even for the golden boy, it fell apart. Like most golden boys, he eventually discovered that his little world just didn’t match reality. In the myth, Siddhartha (he wasn’t the Buddha yet) sees a sick person, an old person, a dead person, and an ascetic; in our lives, we see dysfunctional groups, people playing out the string until they’re vested, people in tedious or dead-end jobs, and people quitting.

So he made his first career change: he walked out on his job, giving up the promise of becoming CEO. He became a bhikkhu, the Pali word for “monk.” But literally it means “beggar.” That, friends, is the courage to begin at the very bottom. He sought out spiritual mentors and teachers to show him the way to spiritual awakening. Unfortunately, they couldn’t do it. They showed him austerities, meditations, self-mortifications, and he excelled in them. He even attracted a little crowd of five disciples, who followed him around thinking he was the best, which he was. But what was the use? He was a glorious success in his second career by any standard but his own: he was the best faster, the best meditator, but he could not solve the question of why we suffer. So he quit. Again.

He ate a little rice dish that a peasant offered him, and his disciples turned away. For them—for the crowd—he had abandoned the correct way. For himself, he was beginning his third career: independent seeker. And once he found this new path, this middle way, he quickly found the answers to his questions. He sat under the Bodhi tree and meditated, determined to go within and find the answers he had failed to find in external circumstances. He began to teach, and he never stopped until his final breath.

Along the way, Siddhartha did the things that any smart career changer would do:

1. Drop a career that makes you miserable. Life is short. Move on and try something new, and keep trying new things until you find what works for you.

2. Listen to the advice of people who love you (like your parents) and to experts (like spiritual teachers), but do not obey them blindly. Test what they say against your own intuitive heart in deciding which path is right for you. Think for yourself, as Siddhartha did.

3. Take time to know yourself. Learn what makes you tick. Discover what makes you truly happy, not superficially but deeply. It takes time and focused attention to learn this. Do not skimp. Ask hard questions of yourself.

4. Once you know what you want, take action. Do not linger in situations that make you unhappy, just for the sake of your family’s wishes or for money. Don’t sell your soul for a paycheck or for others’ approval. Walk your own path. Do you think it was easy for Siddhartha to walk away from his first career into the absolute unknown, giving away everything he ever knew? But he was the Buddha, you say? Not yet. He was just like us—an unhappy guy who knew that life should be more.

How Can You Go about Finding New, Mindful Work?

It’s never too late. Even if you are going to die tomorrow, keep yourself straight and clear and be a happy human being today. If you keep your situation happy day by day, you will eventually reach the greatest happiness of enlightenment.

—Lama Thubten Yeshe, The Bliss of Inner Fire⁴

THE BUDDHA WAS a practical teacher. He didn’t espouse pie-in-the-sky, feel-good, woo-woo stuff. Right livelihood is part of the eightfold path. Let’s see how he might coach you in finding that livelihood.

1. Stay connected to your network of colleagues, friends, and family. Interdependence is as central to the Buddha’s teachings as impermanence. Even monks are meant to live in community, in relationships, in partnerships, in connection to other people. You interact with these folks; let them know your situation.

2. Search for work, not for “a job.” The nature of work has been changing for many years now, with a shift from full-time, 9-to-5 positions to project work, or portfolio work, in which people are hired to work on a project and then move on when the project is done. People in construction and in the entertainment industry have worked like this for years. There is still plenty of work to be done; it’s just, well, impermanent.

3. Don’t look for security—look for opportunity. Security and safety are illusions, fabricated in our minds’ longing to stand on solid ground. There is none. Life is risky and dangerous—breathe … feel your fear … now get out and live anyway.

4. Look for opportunities to serve others. Offer to help people in whatever ways you can. Invest in the interpersonal bank. You must make deposits in the bank before you can make withdrawals—and this is as true with the interpersonal bank as it is with the financial bank. When are you going to do this investing? When you’re busy with new work? Invest your time now.

5. Consider doing volunteer work. It’s easy to slip into self-pity and depression when you’re looking for work. As we advised in another answer, when you’re discouraged, encourage others. It’s amazing how this works. Having commitments to help others keeps you off the pity-pot and involved with the world. And sometimes, volunteer work leads to paid work—you never can tell. You only know you are being a bodhisattva. That’s good already. And since you might believe in that little thing called karma, need we say more?

How Can You Take Good Care of Yourself in Difficult Times?

By knowing yourself, you’re coming to know humanness altogether…. Then you’ll be changing old stuck patterns that are shared by the whole human race. Compassion for others begins with kindness to ourselves.

—Pema Chödrön, Start Where You Are⁵

GOOD SELF-CARE IS important all the time, but especially in times of change, stress, confusion, loss, and pain. You can’t heal the world until you make yourself at least ambulatory.

Begin with the basics: get plenty of sleep, drink your water, eat healthy foods, and get some exercise, even if it’s just walking around the block. Basic self-care takes neither a lot of time nor a lot of money—but it does take seeing yourself as worth it. You are.

In tough times, it’s tempting to comfort ourselves with junk food and other junk pleasures. We turn to alcohol, sweets, TV, shopping: quick ways to turn off mindfulness of our pain. But like a firm mother, the Buddha would guide us (gently, sure, always gently, but still firmly) away from these distractions. As a mother would care for her only child, so should we care for ourselves. Yes, a chocolate or a trashy TV show to soothe the senses when we’re sick, but then time for a little healthy soup and a good book.

Seeking comfort is natural and normal in times of distress and pain, but ultimately the only way out of the pain is through it. The greatest kindness to ourselves is to heal ourselves. After all, there are so many others who need our care!