The Only Thing You Have to Change is Everything

As is often the case, I had a pretty big realization as I was led through downtown Portsmouth this morning by my Southern gentleman master Clooney. The sudden quickening of his pace as we turned the final corner onto Hanover street on our return from his AM walk should have alerted me to a possible issue, but in my defense it was not yet six o’clock and still dark. Before I knew it a take-out container thrown on the sidewalk in front of the 110 Grill had been identified by King C and was being pounced upon. Having been a lab dad for over 24 years now you would think that having my pooch devour any debris resembling food either by looks or odor wouldn’t be of note, but my typical response is an overly intense emotional one.

Now before your imagination tuns wild and you see me screaming at my beloved Clooney in anger, just as my tendency is in most emotional triggering circumstances, I tend to descend into a self-blaming and fearful place. I’m sure that the emotion regulation issues relating to the damage to my frontal lobe from my accident contribute to my frequent internal overreactions, but I can’t deny that self-blame is a common attempt at control I use when faced with challenging situations. All self-psychoanalysis aside, I found myself feeling almost threatened by Clooney’s “treasure” discovery with an internal dialogue going like, “I can’t believe these mindless people would do this to me” and worse, “My inattention may harm my dog.”

Now with hindsight being oh so clear, I can stop the journey down this destructive thought road at the triggering event, but at the time dear reader, my car had already taken the unfortunate turn. So why is it that I’m sitting here typing this post rather than firing off an angry letter to restaurant management, sitting in a holding cell after smashing a window, or even back in bed pouting? And no, the answer certainly isn’t that I’ve reached Nirvana and float peacefully through life after much internal work and professional training! More that after much struggle and being blessed to work with some great people, I may have figured out the thing that had me extremely confused that I often heard in recovery meetings…

It wasn’t a single thought or slogan that had me in a state of bewilderment, rather two apparent common refrains that seemed to contradict each other: “No big changes early on” and “The only thing you need to change is everything.” I mean, come on, logical thinking seems to imply that “everything” will certainly involve some pretty big things! That’s when it hit me: Somewhere in my many readings in an attempt to find the fix to my being a limited, imperfect, and fallible human being I came upon a discussion with Marianne Williamson to the effect that a “miracle can simply be a shift in perspective”. Perhaps this miraculous shift from being the center of the universe, enduring a life happening to me, into an individual experiencing a vast world of Billions of lives coexisting, containing infinite happenings, is the single thing that needed to change.

I have always been one who looks to find the easier, softer way to address any difficulty. To be honest, I’ve surely spent more time exploring alternative strategies to completing many tasks than it would have taken to simply put my head down and do the work that I sought to avoid in the first place. While I still find myself at times in patterns of procrastination and avoidance, overwhelmed by the thought that to become my most productive and helpful self in the world, “(I) need to change everything”: I think I might have found that by changing one thing, everything is changed. I have to agree with Ms. Williamson, such a shift in perspective is indeed miraculous.