photo by lynn smith via flickr

A while back, I used to work with a young programmer fresh out of school. He started out writing reports for a tricky customer, and, though he did the best he could deciphering the instructions, his work came back week after week with changes. Eventually, he cracked.

“Are. They. Ever. Going. TO JUST BE HAPPY WITH THE FREAKING REPORT??”

I was older and wiser, so I told him to shut up and be grateful they wanted changes because that meant he would continue to have a job. His job = fixing people’s reports. I don’t know if he ever really got that point, but it always stuck with me.

I see our place in history right now much as I saw my young friend. As human beings, inhabitants of planet Earth, which is run by a master tweaker called evolution, it is our job to change, to adapt and transcend and roll with the punches and grow. That is the job of every living thing—to live, to thrive, to develop—and we humans are very uniquely suited for it.

And yet so many of us resist. With everything in us, we cling to what we (think we) know. We shoot down new ideas without really letting them in. We spend more time trying to convince ourselves that we are content than we do in actions that bring us contentment.

My intent is not to scold—I resist changing, too—but to understand. Thinking about it from a rational perspective, it does seem kinda silly, right? Like beating ourselves up because we can’t get the ocean to stop churning. I do not pretend to know the entire Meaning of Life, but it seems evident that stability and security and tidily wrapped up loose ends are not among its major themes.

And of course, a lot of us agree that the world needs to change, right? It’s not like we have everything running smoothly yet. It’s obvious that we have a great deal more to figure out about living in a way that works for the entire environment—natural, social, and political. So with all these good reasons to jump headfirst into creating the future, why do we still have such a hard time with exploring new ideas and experimenting with our own lives?

There are many good reasons, I think, especially at this time in history — we’re too busy, broke, and disconnected to be bothered. But I wonder if there’s also something deeper than that, some sort of built-in aversion to change, or some kind of historical pattern set up in us that seeks permanence. One possibility? The kind of stories we like.

The importance of stories can’t really be overestimated. They are what cultures and peoples are made out of. Truth is transmitted in them, old wisdom is handed down, and new realms of possibility open up when you listen. They are the primary way we communicate with each other and have been for millenia, with very few changes to their structure. We like our intriguing set ups, revealing climaxes, and inevitable endings. It’s an ancient, deeply satisfying pattern, and, in hard times, imagining our own happy endings can strengthen our spirits.

But so often I sense, in myself and in the people around me, a strange expectation that life should perform like a story. We think that once we reach a new milestone—lose so much weight, get married, make X amount of dollars—we will be happy and we can then ride off into the sunset. We will “be done.”

Think of every Hollywood romance you ever saw. The couple gets together, and bam! That’s the end. Of course, in reality, the marriage lasts a lot longer than the wedding (usually), but there are very few stories about what to do with this dreamy partner once you’ve snagged him. We only seem to be concerned with the milestone, not the changes that come after it.

And this is a pattern that is repeated in almost every story we hear from childhood on up, an old, old trail that’s been traveled for thousands of years. Wishing for a happy ending that we rationally know will never arrive is not just a silly thing humans do; at this point, it’s a building block of who we are.

To consciously participate in the creation of the future, it’s important to get familiar with this particular strain of thought, and to keep an eye on it so it knows it can’t run things. Because when it does, we end up racing through life trying to “get there” without paying much attention to where “there” is. And that, my fellow security-seekers, is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place.

When the annoying little child in the backseat of our minds jumps up and down and hollers Are we there yet are we there yet are we there yet, it is very tempting to just go a little faster to try to shut her up. But we don’t have to make this choice. Instead we can remember who is driving. The fact is, no, we are not there yet and we will never be. Life is not done until death, and most of us even don’t see that as a full stop. The name of the game in this world seems to be change a little, then change some more. We’ll never “be done.”

In fact, as soon as we solve the issues we have now (and I insist on being optimistic that we will), new and different issues will develop. This is evolution, and it operates by messing around causing problems and proposing solutions trial-and-error style until something works. It’s as though nature has so many ideas, she doesn’t know what to do with them, so she’s decided to try out every last one. Some work and some don’t, but taken as a whole, it’s a pretty amazing system, and it’s all built on change and experimentation.

Maybe it’s time for us to stop fighting and embrace the engine of the universe—transformation—and see where it leads us.