09 Mar Personal transformation can start with a whisper, not a bang
Change doesn’t have to be big.
From little things, big things grow.
When it comes to happiness and wellbeing, doing the right type of little things, consistently and over the long term, is often the easiest and best way to achieve what you want.
So, if you want more happiness and health and feel small steps might be more manageable than big ones then read on …
via Psyche by Jennifer Windt
When we tell our stories, we often focus on the tectonic events that have structured the landscape of our lives. We might recall the moment we met our future partner and fell in love at first sight; the time we were utterly broken by the unexpected death of a loved one; or a moment of spiritual awakening or enlightenment. These experiences are so profound that they change us forever. They shake the very foundations of our belief and value systems, altering both the world we inhabit and who we take ourselves to be. In the aftermath, nothing is the same.
We tend to think of major personal transformations as big, loud and sudden. We imagine an explosion of fireworks or, conversely, an earthquake that brings everything crashing down. But personal transformations don’t always follow a ‘bang’. Sometimes they build from a whisper.
As a philosopher of mind, I think the key ingredients of personal transformation are not always found in tectonic events. Drawing from research on consciousness in sleep, dreaming and mind-wandering, I believe that the landscape of our lives can be changed in much more subtle and gradual ways. This type of change can easily be overlooked when we focus on fireworks or earthquakes. Yet the ingredients of personal transformation are in each of us, right now, in the incessant whispers in our stream of consciousness.
We all have a near-constant flow of thoughts and images that runs through our minds by day and night, channelling our decisions, actions and emotions. Though we can focus our attention and deliberately think through a particular problem, many of the thoughts and images in our stream of consciousness happen spontaneously without intention or reflection. They bubble up and disappear seemingly on their own and, if we become aware of them at all, we often forget about them immediately afterwards. Though inconspicuous and elusive, these spontaneous thoughts and images form a near-constant backdrop to our conscious lives; they are the whispers in our stream of consciousness.
Because of their elusiveness, these thoughts are not the same as the experiences and events we typically associate with large-scale personal transformation. But just as a trickle of water can, over time, cut deep gorges into a landscape, so too can the whispers of spontaneous thoughts scale up to larger changes. To understand the transformative potential of our stream of consciousness, I suggest we look in places where these ‘whispers’ are least suppressed: our dreams and daydreams…
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