During my master’s program, a well-respected professor of mine once talked about the concept of whether or not he believed people were actually capable of change. Fully engulfed in the land of abstract therapeutic theory at the time, I didn’t pay much attention to his response, perhaps due to the fact that I immediately wrote it off as irrational catastrophizing or maybe just out of disinterest, but his statement stuck in the recesses of my mind, waiting for nights such as this to surface.
“______,” he said, “I don’t believe people are capable of producing sustained change.” Then, after a pregnant pause, he concluded, “but I do believe in miracles.”
Graduation that subsequent fall did nothing to stifle my zeal and superficial confidence in my ability to change lives, even though I still in large degree considered the idea of getting paid to listen a fundamentally ludicrous concept. To some extent I still do. Regardless, the world I believed was ready for my talents. People were not only capable of change I thought, they were in an active and lifelong pursuit of finding purposeful change.
Several years after beginning my work in the mire of human existence, my perspective has not surprisingly changed.
Maybe I was half right; mankind does have a seemingly unquenchable thirst for greater purpose. Problem is, more often than not shit happens, and as a result people get stuck. Fearing intimacy, getting hurt, lethal shame, an unproductive search for significance, disappointment, poor peer relationships, pooled ignorance, enabling, or something as subtle as unrealistic expectations, individuals adapt physical and emotional defenses that enhance a façade of strength and/or confidence while further limiting their ability to be truly known, truly understood, and maybe, just maybe, truly accepted.
It’s one of life’s ultimate ironies, this incredible anticipation of pain that inevitably drives us to inaction, emotional stagnancy, and isolation. We are indeed a crooked race. As a wise man once wrote, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”
And yet, I still have hope; fleeting glimpses of connection to ultimate purpose, purpose worth fighting for, worth dying for, worth changing for. Beauty in the midst of ashes, flowers that grow out of cement, an undeserved smile from a friend, or an unconditional hug.
Thank God for miracles.
