According to a pretty smart fellow named Toynbee, progress is a function of successive challenges, successfully answered. Thing is, people by and large like themselves, their lifestyles and belief systems. Once they take to a new idea or practice, they tend to stick with it until the idea breaks down.
Yeah, that's how I roll, too. Because Change - change is hard to do. It's much easier to keep betting on the same-old.
Change - never mind anticipating challenges with proactive change - is very hard. Communicating the need to change proactively, because otherwise a future consequence will ensue - is even harder. Yet try to communicate we do, because we must. The issues are too serious, the consequences of silence, ignorance and inaction too great.
However, convincing yourself to change may be the hardest task of all. It shouldn't be, yet it is. You have access to all the information - what you want, what you can afford, what works for you. Yet we often cling to the same-old ideas, actions, habits and beliefs. We keep betting on the same-old.
This is more than a theoretical exercise at the moment. Throughout the Rio, where Netroots Nation is currently taking place, I see many people sitting at slot machines, glumly pressing the "bet" "spin" "hold" "draw" buttons, knowing intellectually that in the short run, usually, and in the long run, always, the house wins. What keeps those people in their seats?
Oh, let's not be coy. This is not about them - What kept me playing blackjack yesterday, getting dealt 12s, 13s, 14s and 15s endlessly? Eventually I left the table, the old fashioned way. Lost all my chips.
Which goes right to the issue of change. I knew, intellectually, even emotionally, that round of blackjack was just not working out. Now, I had a limit for myself and once I hit it I walked. That's a good thing. What would have been better is a proactive change - don't play that game.
It's not like I don't know blackjack rules. They're very simple - highest hand up to 21 wins. Some other rules (aces can be 1 or 11, splits of matching pairs, doubling down) apply.
I'm not playing blackjack on some false hope that I will get rich doing this - ever. Still one would like to this it is possible to get a 20% return on a stake. Is it more likely than losing 100%? Funny thing - the answer is clearly "no", but people - this one among them - still shove $20 bills into the machines on some rather silly notion that, this time, the outcome will be possible.
Yesterday I was just bummed I wasted my lunch money playing blackjack.
This morning I woke up, realizing how many times in my life that I have basically been playing blackjack on a cold table. No, worse - I have been knowingly and willfully betting on the same-old.
Now, some thoughts, ideas, actions, habits and emotions are good things to keep in play. A respect for rule of law, a belief that all persons have certain inalienable rights, a reverence for the rarity of lasting love in all its forms. Yep... life is full of graces that should never dismissed out of hand... but I was talking about blackjack. Let me get back to that.
I think that playing blackjack yesterday, to the bitter end of my small stack o chips, was a metaphor for change in all its forms.
I didn't want to change my decisions, my emotions, my choices or my belief system a bit. So long as I was at that table, I wanted to win, I had an operational definition of how to do so, and an ability to move my goalposts up and down in dollar amount to justify sticking around a l'il bit longer.
In other words, logic and self-interest had nothing to do with it.
Emotional satisfaction did not have anything to do with it at all.
I had a belief system that, dammit, surely the streak of 12s, 13s, 14s and 15s getting dealt out to me would END! and SOON!
And end the streak did. When my chips ended.
I had the rest of the day and last evening (and some of this morning) to reflect on this stunning setback to my blackjack belief system. How many times had I basically dealt myself bad cards - in work, in health, even in my marriage? All three are rather important things to have a handle on.
Over the past four years I've gotten much better at taking a proactive stance in managing my tendency to, well, bet on a non-optimal same-old set of beliefs, expectations and habits. I don't like writing so much about my internal dialogues because, well, I don't really feel the desperate need to do so that I once did. Yet really... that's just me showing some bad cards. I hid that type of sharing away because I was afraid to do so. I was being forced to recognize that betting on the same-old wasn't working for me.
And that was very scary.
And it was very much like that blackjack table yesterday. Four years of working out what wasn't working, running notions and impulse and behaviors into the ground, again and again, until all that was left, ultimately, was me in a coma in a hospital for three weeks earlier this year on a truly cold table - My chances of dying were worse than even odds.
Obviously I lived.. but it was not permission to keep doing the same things. It was not permission to keep betting on the same-old.
Immediately after my time in the hospital I was awash in big existential questions - What did this mean? What do I do with this grace, this second chance, this.. new chance to grow old? I didn't know what to say to myself. So I deferred this questions. I still am to this day.
What I focused on was what I could control - what I ate, what I worked on, what I said and - this was a big surprise for me - what I felt about things, and for other people.
I did have one takeaway from my time in the hospital - I became much more jealous for my joy, more hungry for my sense of purpose, more respectful of the role of social validation to reinforce behaviors - good and bad - and how to take peer pressure into account (something I'd dismissed out of hand all my life).
More particularly I have become much less patient with wastes of my time, my compassion and my energy. I don't have an endless supply of friends but I have many friends who love me, whose love is welcome and who welcome my love.
And many of them are here at Netroots Nation.
That's something I don't want to change.
That's a kind of betting on the same-old I can live with.
Because that's a very kind gamble to make - a mutual investment in shared community. In human connections, in the words of one attendee here.
And I think, as we contemplate how to approach our brethren on the right, we should be mindful of our own aversion to change.
We have things we like to think and feel and do and be. So do the Republicans.
It does not mean we should attempt to be untrue to ourselves and those who trust us in order to be a little, unwelcome part of their lives.
It just means we should reflect on our own tendency to place bad bets on cold blackjack tables of all kinds.
We need to recognize - more quickly, more proactively and more constructively - what changes we need to make. Then start making them.
I've had a pretty rough go the past four years in three major areas of my life. But you know what? I still have a job...my health is returning.. and my beloved MKKendrick will be attending all future Netroots Nations conventions, just the two of us, for so long as we are both able to do so.
And those are bets on the same-old I will do until I can do them no more.