As we wade into 2022, I have been thinking about change this week. Everyone talks about change this time of year in many contexts, including goal setting and quarterly targets. But, are those things “change?”
In most cases, the things that people resolve to do at the beginning of the year are actually the end results, but nobody ever thinks about the actual process of change. So, we set goals or make resolutions, but without a process or path to reach those goals, we fail pretty quickly, which ultimately leads to shame and more failure. It seems to me that the process is more important than the goal, because as “they” say, “Man plans and God laughs.” Even with the best goals, we still end up in different places than we envisioned. And, most people are not actually embracing change, they are reminiscing about reliving the past. Whenever I hear people talk about change, many of them say things like, “We have to get back to doing what we do best,” “We have to return to our values,” or “We need to make it like it was.” You can sum all those statement up with the explanation, “…but we have always done it that way.”
I wish I could express in words how much a hate that phrase. That phrase is death. What a way to murder an idea – pit it against the sum total of history. Seriously. Every discovery of mankind from the workings of the solar system to teaching cats to use a toilet instead of a litter box (my best friend is training her cat to do this currently) has been made because someone starting doing things differently. We need to embrace change, which is inevitable, but more importantly, we need to be curious to try new things, new ideas, and to recognize new contexts.
For example, in Biblical scholarship, much of our understanding of the Bible has changed within the last 200 years. I know some heads just exploded, but hear me out. Christianity has only been around for 2022 years give or take. The Bible, as we know it today, is younger than that. And, archeology really wasn’t a thing until the 1800s. A lot of what we have learned about most ancient cultures has been during the last couple of centuries. Think about that. You think because the cultures are old that our knowledge is old, but it isn’t. We are always discovering new things. So, we need to remain flexible and curious about what we “know,” meaning we shouldn’t ever try to repeat the past, we should continue to evolve. We should learn from the past, knowing how we always did it, but we should work on new processes and new ideas to change the world rather than trying to recreate things that are no longer relevant.
Whatever you want to change, you must keep moving forward, whether it is gaining a better understanding of Biblical Hebrew or First Century Palestine, or amending capitalism into a more employee, environment, and consumer-friendly culture, or eliminating the need for kitty litter in your home. As author, Simon Sinek states, “What got us here, won’t get us there.”
