Saltatory Change
Posted by Elizabeth
This week I’ve been reading Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, a fantastic memoir by Rhoda Janzen about her experiences growing up in a Mennonite family, leaving the faith, and eventually returning to her roots after tragedy touches her life. Over the course of a truly terribly year, Janzen experiences a botched hysterectomy, her husband leaves her for Bob from Gay.com and, six days later, she’s in a devastating car accident that leaves her with serious injuries. Where else is there to go but home?
Aside from being a bitterly funny read about Ms. Janzen’s experiences as a 44 year-old woman returning to live at home with her parents, at its heart it’s a book about change. Namely, what do we do when life throws an onslaught of unwelcome changes in our path? And can forward movement really be accomplished by going back? If you want to learn something about resiliency and forgiveness, necessary ingredients in the process of change, read this book, because Janzen is a picture of both.
During her time at home with her parents, Janzen reconnects with a childhood friend, a woman with whom she shares a great deal in common but whose life took a completely different path. Janzen chose the secular path to academia, while her friend, Eva, becomes a Mennonite scholar. Janzen leads a cosmopolitan life sans children; sensible Eva is a small-town mother of two. And yet, at their core they are so similar that each woman sees how her own life could have easily turned out like the other’s. In the wake of a dinner at Eva’s house, Janzen ponders the following:
I sometimes ask my college students if they think it’s possible for a thirty-plus adult to experience saltatory ideological change. I tell them that I’m not talking about the kind of gradual mellowing that results from age. Nor do I mean the kind of abrupt character fissure that opens in the wake of trauma or suffering. Rather, I want to know what they think about the possibility of a profound, lasting change that emerges from an act of deliberated, conscious self-determination. I want to know if they think we can change our core assumptions about what we believe. About how we believe. Yes, say my students. Absolutely! Of course we can change! And then I marvel at their hope. My students carry optimism around in their backpacks like bright bottles of designer water.
Saltatory. I admit, I had to look up the word in the dictionary (MS Word didn’t recognize it either, and kept insisting I change the word to “salutatory”). According to Merriam-Webster, the definition is “proceeding by leaps rather than gradual transitions.” And this definition made me chuckle a little, because when Anne and I talk about our differing approaches to change, this is often how we couch it: I make sweeping changes, and Anne makes small adjustments. In fact, I’m grateful to have a single, concise word that perfectly captures how I face change, and I plan to use it as often as humanely possible. And although my changes tend to be saltatory, I often find myself posing the same questions that Janzen does. Is real self-imposed change possible? I know this is a question I’ve posed here before, but I’d like to look at it from a different angle. From the angle of happiness.
When I was younger, everything seemed possible. There was nothing so permanent in my life that couldn’t be changed. All of the structures, the scaffolding, that held my up my little world were precariously temporary. I liked it that way, because it meant that anything could be torn down and rebuilt at any time. I had so much faith in saltatory change. As I’ve matured, while the lure of dramatic change is still there, I find myself less enamored with it. I find myself working harder to make the most of my circumstances rather than change those circumstances, perhaps because I know, deep down, that the attachments I’ve made mean that my life is more or less fixed in a certain constellation. By virtue of making certain choices, I’ve eliminated others. This dawning realization isn’t sad or hopeless or depressing for me. It just means a new phase of life where happiness doesn’t necessarily equal saltatory change – a stage I couldn’t have predicted when I was a college student in my late teens. Because as the happiness research says, we’re terrible at predicting what will make us happy in the future because we’re bound by what we think we will make us happy today. And as a 20-something, the things I thought would have made me happy at 31 are far different than the things that really make me happy.
So is it possible to change our core beliefs at any age? Sure it is. But I think, at this stage, we’re more likely to feel the pull of making the most of what our life is – unless life-altering circumstances force us otherwise – because, for most of us, saltatory change isn’t what it once was.
Answer the question that Janzen posed to her college students: is it possible for a thirty-plus adult to experience saltatory ideological change? Are we happier accepting our lot in life or struggling against it (or something in between)?
In other news, our friends, Emily and Jennifer, at Mothers of Brothers were nominated as one of the Top 50 Mommy Bloggers by Babble.com. As they say at the Oscars, it’s an honor just to be nominated, right ladies? But I’d love to see them win, so if you support their great blog, vote for them here.
January 11th, 2010 at 7:00 am
Elizabeth — The book sounds so intriguing that I’m going to go read it…before I finish reading your blog. Sorry! Then, I’ll come back and read your blog and try to make a halfway intelligent comment!! Thanks so much for writing this today.
January 11th, 2010 at 7:45 am
I agree with Jan. I’m whisking off to my library website now to reserve this book online (too cheap to actually buy it, sorry). Thanks for the recommendation on the book, and for the plug on the mommy blog voting!
January 11th, 2010 at 8:19 am
Great! Let me know what you think of the book!
January 11th, 2010 at 8:50 am
This post reminds me of a much more depressing take on the same issue from David Foster Wallace:
“I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting now to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable – if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.” – David Foster Wallace
What strikes me about this (besides how sad it is, especially in light of his suicide), is the part about being a grown up. The saltatory changes definitely get harder as our grown up responsibilities stack up. Sure, it’s always possible to make a drastic change, but once those changes have an impact on other people we have to consider them more carefully.
January 11th, 2010 at 10:57 am
Much like Janzen’s college students, I think I carried around that optimism at one time. But I’m a little sad to say that I probably don’t today. Perhaps this is to justify everything I’ve done in my adult life. That is, if I could walk away from it and all it stands for, then have the past 10 years been a total waste? But also, I don’t believe that they have been a total waste and think that, for me at least, saltatory change would be a mistake.
January 11th, 2010 at 12:32 pm
You’re right, Anne. That IS depressing. But a marvelous quote that captures one of the toughest things we have to face in changing and growing older: closing doors.
January 11th, 2010 at 12:55 pm
Looking at my life from an almost 50 POV, I say yes! Saltatory change is always available, always there. You do, as you get older, have more people to consider but on a personal basis, it is always there.
I have a running list of books and just added this one to the list.
January 11th, 2010 at 4:36 pm
Glad to have the almost-50 perspective on this one, Nicki!
January 11th, 2010 at 11:17 pm
Hi Elizabeth – Great blog you have here. I’m a first timer and came over based on a recommendation Nicki left on my blog. You know, I think as we age maybe we don’t do as much saltatory change because we’re wiser. I did a lot of leaping in earlier days, and while I don’t regret it, it’s not as fun anymore. Now, I want to ease into my transitions. Right now I’m gearing up for a move in a year or so, and I actually have been living p.t. in the new town to make sure it’s what I really want. I NEVER would have done that in my twenties; in fact I sold everything I owned and moved to NYC at 24. But now I like experimenting, pondering, reflecting. I guess the danger there is pondering too long, and then the change never happens. Thanks for the thoughtful post.
January 12th, 2010 at 8:07 am
Welcome to Life in Pencil, Patty! Thanks for your comment. It seems like the general consensus on this is one is that saltatory change just isn’t as satisfying as we grow older. Not that we’re not capable of it — we just don’t feel as much of a need.