Change+is+Changing

Something is different. Life is busier. No question about that. But there's also a feeling like the one you get when you've heard a song one too many times. We do all these things that this busier life demands of us, but there's a sense we've done them before. In fact, we've done them over and over again. Everything we're doing is just repeating some pattern. The pattern feels old. We want something new. And it's not just new things that we want. We know, somewhere deep down, that there's a place where life feels new every moment. It's delicious. One of the beauties of teaching has been its high potential for this newness. (Unfortunately, with the rise of the testing movement, this newness is in shorter supply.)

The process is developmental. When we're younger, the pattern feels new. Because it is. What seems to be happening, however, is that the pattern is playing out faster and faster, and people are playing it out younger and younger.

Our general approach to change is often one of mere rearrangement and the preservation of the pattern. Now, of course, this is a slippery discussion. One can argue that new patterns are born every day. But I'm talking about the pattern behind the patterns. Dare we call it the Pattern? Whatever we call it, it's the bedrock of conceptualization.

In essence, change is changing. The old change process is one of adding things. The new change process is about removing them. (As a programmer, my greatest moments were when debugging resulted in the throwing away of lines of code, rather than the usual adding of them.) Removing things bring a simplicity that is a close cousin of the newness. It is a recognition and appreciation of the empty space between that which makes up the patterns. The space, the simplicity, the newness. Out of these come truly new creations. This is innovativeness: the capacity to give birth to the truly new.