The More Things Change, The More Things Change

finding stability through upheaval... and a Blue Room gathering

Between now and March 25th, I’ll be donating 50% of all new supporting subscriptions to World Central Kitchen for their work in Gaza.

Ruggedness and Flexibility… we’re going to need both.

I don’t know anyone who’s not overwhelmed with the pace of the world and the crush of news, much of it bad. (If you’re handling all of this OK, tell us your secret!)

I recently learned the word allostasis, a scientific term meaning “stability through change.” Allostasis is distinct from homeostasis, an older term. From this New York Times piece by Brad Stulberg:

Essentially, homeostasis says healthy systems return to the same starting point following a change: X to Y to X. By contrast, in allostasis, healthy systems also crave stability after a change, but the baseline of that stability can be somewhere new: X to Y to Z.

If you’re a religious nerd, you’ll see similarities between allostasis and Richard Rohr’s three stages of spiritual maturity: order, disorder, and reorder. And if you’re an even bigger religious nerd, you may recognize Walter Brueggeman’s work with the psalms, how they also follow a threefold pattern: 

• orientation (the world makes sense)

• disorientation (in turmoil, crying out in lament) 

• new orientation (we’re out of the pit, but there’s no going back to the binary thinking of stage one—a shift has occurred)

Having ridden various waves of change and upheaval over my life, I’m wondering whether the third move is ever fully realized, or whether we simply gain a comfort with disorder: a greater ability to cope in a world that seems perpetually in stage two. Whether it’s reading the news, or offering care and compassion to the people around me and to myself, it’s hard to catch my breath sometimes, and I know I’m not alone. 

Or do some of us find it hard to let ourselves fully trust the newfound, hard-won stability of stage three? Richard Rohr argues that some religious conservatives never leave the order of stage one (every day with Jesus is sweeter than the day before!). Meanwhile some religious progressives dwell too long in disorder (we loooooove to lament). My kids are doing well (ish) right now; they’re in a relatively quiet, stable place at the moment, thankfully. But I’m reluctant to call it reorder or new orientation. Perhaps that’s my hyper-vigilance talking… a refusal to let my guard down lest we be surprised by another wave. I’m sure I have some work to do there. In any event, this moment feels like remission, not a stable state for all time. If it’s stage three, it’s a ragged reorder at best. The good news after this difficult season is that our family has courage, strength, and resilience at levels we never had before. And we have love, abundant love, forged in the refiner’s fire of the past several years. So my invitation is to find joy right here—to see the goodness that’s happening right now. Even if the ghost of disorder lurks in the attic. 

Allostasis, as an inter- and intra-personal dynamic, speaks into the ambiguity of being in new orientation that still has some disorienting features, or vice versa. From Stulberg in the NYT: 

The way to stay stable through the process of change is by changing, at least to some extent. If you want to hold your footing, you’ve got to keep moving.

Or as Jon Kabat-Zinn says, “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” Allostasis is a muscular state of being, a set of skills that allows us to weather stage two, for however long it lasts. Not just weather it, flow with it.

As the weather gets warmer and the days grow longer, and the clocks shift an hour ahead, giving us even more daylight in the evenings, I think back to where we were in mid-March one, two, three, and four years ago. The body keeps the score when it comes to lockdown and covid, and I remember with great clarity what that time felt like. Maybe it will always be that way, that the daffodils and softened earth bring thoughts of makeshift masks and wiping down groceries—though the intensity of that remembering fades year by year, as it should. Some aspects of post-covid life feel homeostatic; others cry out for creative allostasis. In some ways we’ve talked the pandemic to death; in other important ways we haven’t dealt with it nearly enough, not really… especially the collective vulnerability we experienced, a vulnerability that’s still reverberating in a bunch of important and not-always-helpful ways. Climate change will require many of the same skills and mindsets that covid required, and well, our report card is mixed at best. Our fates are bound up in one another.

I wrote to y’all last month about so-called conservative stories—not a partisan term, but a narrative one, especially in science fiction: evil intrudes on a good world and is defeated, allowing the world to return to its previous good state. That’s homeostasis. 

Progressive stories, on the other hand, follow this allostatic pattern:

• The world starts out as a familiar place.

• The status quo is disrupted.

• The people adjust to a world that will never be the same. 

The thing about progressive stories, though, is that the “new normal” could be bad, but it could also be very good. According to author Ted Chiang, from whom I first heard these terms, it may depend on where you sit:

Aristocrats might have thought the world was ending when feudalism was abolished during the French Revolution, but the world didn’t end; the world changed. (The critic John Clute has said that the French Revolution was one of the things that gave rise to science fiction.)

It’s important to note that when change happens too quickly, when the chaos is too extreme, it stresses an individual and a society, leading to all kinds of negative health outcomes. While we were all confronted with our own vulnerability during the pandemic, that vulnerability was not equally distributed. Some of our so-called allostatic load is out of our control, though I’m interested in how we create systems and structures that allow for more humane flourishing. But we can also expand our individual capacity to find stability through change. Stulberg says this work requires a combination of ruggedness and flexibility. 

So let’s get together and talk about it. I’ll be hosting a lunchtime gathering for supporting subscribers on Monday, March 25, at noon EDT to discuss this post and the broader idea of allostasis. How do you find stability within change? What are your trusted practices; where do you find inspiration or guidance? I’ll share some of mine, and we’ll build a curriculum together. Come ready to learn and share; the session will be recorded and available to supporting subscribers after. I’m working on a special guest as well.

Between now and the 25th, I’ll be donating 50% of all new subscriptions to World Central Kitchen for their work in Gaza.

Zoom info is below. Yes, that’s the Monday of Holy Week—for those of us in the Christian tradition, the drama of Christ’s death and resurrection will provide a valuable backdrop. (It’s Passover too!)