Saturday, May 05, 2007

Sorry vessels for change

Sorry vessels for change

“When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide
There I stop and I turn and I go for a ride
Till I get to the bottom and I see you again…”

From Helter Skelter, The Beatles, in The White Album

There’s this déjà vu quality to progression that mocks the entire effort. Why, your philosophical self asks your prosaic side, do you bother to strive if all you really want is more of the same? In other words, if you are poor, you want to be poorer. No, not quite. You want to be the opposite. If you are weak, you want to be strong. If you are ugly, you want to be beautiful.

But what about if you already are, in some measure, what you want to be? Then you definitely want more of the same, not the opposite. You want more power if you are already powerful, better cars, if you already have them and so on.

This is fine as it stands, because it is understandable that you want to get all the things you do not have under your belt in short order. It is equally valid that you should want to preserve and enhance all your privileges. Change is a double-edged sword of freedom that can cut through Gordian knots that oppress you while whispering simultaneously of the whirlwind that can consume you if you are not vigilant. So, this is about recognising change either as an opportunity or a threat, depending on who you are and where you are located in the pecking order.

Since most of our crystal balls are singularly foggy about how change will affect us, quite a lot of us stick to the devil we know as opposed to new fangled devils one has yet to figure out. Tradition draws upon the status quo and seduces its adherents by reassuring them with the weight of times past when the premise has acquitted itself honourably, enhancing the established order, keeping the ship of life on course and shielded from the upsets of the ocean deep.

For the have-nots who constitute the whole world in one season or the other, because we can all point at various items lacking in our lives, the preservationist model is not par for the course. So, the duality of wanting more while hanging on to what we already have makes us take the plunge. Of course the resultant waves rock the raft of our primacy on whatever it is we do possess!

This brings us to the non sequitur of the “free lunch” and we readily agree we must pay for our cravings. You have got to give in order to get and such other homilies flood the brain. We are persuaded to take the plunge and become accomplices to rocking our raft, the very one we are perched on.

The ride begins and we feel strangely liberated, as if, just for a little while, we have demonstrated worth, as if we have dared to live up to our potential. Then the storm of uncertainty overcomes us, stripping away security, mocking our established order, destroying sentimental things. We are not very sure this was worth the trouble. We have done this out of pride, so now we have to take the fall. Our minds are sorry vessels for change clinging to vestiges of familiar things, revising pride into abject denial, bolstering it with Dutch Courage that hopes it is all a dream that we will awaken from and find everything is as it was before.

The Changemeister asks if that is what you really want because I can freeze your request and put things back the way they were. But are you sure, because I do not want to waste my time. A twinge of pride creeps back amongst the rising panic and we find ourselves saying no, carry on, but tell me it won’t hurt too much.

And thus mankind makes progress as a process of overcoming fear of the little known. Brave processes that plump for loss of primacy as a distinct possibility. We can prove we are not beyond redemption if we try to change. We dimly realise what will happen if we stand still. So we move on and after enough time elapses all the progress we have made becomes history, even tradition. Is it any wonder that we get the feeling that we’ve somehow seen it all before?

(750 words)

By Gautam Mukerji
First published in The Pioneer
www.dailypioneer.com on Monday, April 8th, 1996
on the OP-ED page in the Analysis section, Musings column

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