Simple and Wrong

Transition.

I hate the word.

The organisation I work with has been in transition for a couple of years and it has been a painful and complicated process.

My Dad often says

Nobody looks good in transition

It’s so true!

I think I am starting to understand a little bit about the nature of transition and why it is so complicated.

Carl Jung once said:

The most important question you can ask is: what is the myth [story] by which you live your life?

I am discovering that the reason some forms of transition are so complex is that they call into question the story by which we live our lives.

Although largely unconscious, most of us have a set of beliefs about the way the world works, and we make our decisions and live from these beliefs kind of like a platform.

For all of us there are moments that change these tidy arrangements and ask questions about our assumptions.

I am currently teaching the book of Ecclesiastes to our students and the whole of the book is about challenging those fundamental assumptions that many of us live our lives by.

I think part of the reason transition is so complex for us is that we are having to find new ways of understanding ourselves in a different context, we are having to find a new story.

The times of my life where I have been in transition I have discovered to be a little like being in a coloring book without the color.. just the outlines.. I have stepped into a world that I don’t fully appreciate or understand and I try to navigate with just the outlines to guide me.

One of the most difficult aspects for me of this transition period have been the way people have been operating from different stories about each other.

All we can see of each other is the parts of our behavior that we can remember, and we find ways of using that behavior to ascribe motive, and from that ascribed motive, we create a story to explain our relationship with each other. We might not be conscious that we are doing it but we are.

We are all incredibly complex, but what we believe about each other can tend towards being simplistic and black and white.

I’m reminded of the quote from H.L. Mencken:

Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.

One of the sad things about the Norway killer was that he was clearly living from an overly simplistic story about the nature of reality.

Whenever we reduce people to a simple explanation it may help justify our feeling world but ultimately it is dehumanizing and damaging.

One of the things most complex about transition is that there has not been the time to understand the light and shade, the nuance that is actually part of every interaction. Instead we have outlines that we fill with our own imagination.

The more we cling to these outlines filled by our imagination, the less flexible and the less open to reality we become, and therefore the more likely we are to end up in conflict as we try to hold on to the integrity of the way we see the world.

One of the things I love about Jesus is that he challenged people’s world views, and he even challenged the way the bible was taught.

A throwaway line about effective teachers of the law shows just how revolutionary he is:

He said to them, “Therefore every teacher of the law who has been instructed about the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.” (Matthew 13:52)

Many of the Pharisees had neat, tight theologies based on both the Scriptures and the tradition of Rabbinical teaching. Jesus here is saying that those sources are valid and helpful, but a good teacher of the law holds them lightly, and is able to bring fresh new truth as well as old.

In transition we can get stuck in old ways of thinking, and those old ways no longer serve us in a new reality. They become outlines in which we paint our own color rather than taking the time to discover the truth.

Transition is an exciting time because it allows us to move out of the ruts in which we have found ourselves, but it is also a dangerous time because the pain of the unknown can lead us to make simple and lazy conclusions about each other and the world.

These assumptions can harden and become the basis for conflict.

Life is complicated. People are complicated.

When we reduce life or people to black and white caricatures we might feel better in the short term but the longer term consequences can be catastrophic.