The plight of being alive is ongoingly facing the demand for change, the shifting current against which we often stand grudgingly resistant, if not stubbornly inert.
To the degree that we are anything at all, we are our situation. There are not two -- ourselves and our situation. We may describe them, that way -- but an astute observer will testify that we are part of our situation. What a curious thing that situation is — our inertia, our preference to remain precisely as we are, while we offer and suffer that resistance as if it were "worth it".
That tension has another name: stress.
A customer, in this sense, is enmeshed in a situation. The feeling of being enmeshed is the same as the feeling of wanting out. That's what makes them a customer: enmeshment plus wanting out.
Our inertia and resistance to change are why we experience ourselves as enmeshed in our situations -- even as we wish for relief. Inertia and resistance keep us occupied with that which we resist. Enmeshed.
When situations arrive, they arrive not into acceptance, but into an act of profound and often unconscious refusal, or perhaps cautious, guarded acceptance of the inevitable.
That could be uncomfortable.
This is the core tension: How does the customer refuse change when their very presence in a situation is a call for interaction? We refuse change by clinging to the idea of a desired situation—one we may not have vividly imagined, for if we had, its attractive force would already be an engine of our own liberation.
Instead, we resist. We resist change: the new job, the change of relationship standing, the altered financial landscape, the change of diet or hygiene ... the shifting comforts of their life. Their struggle isn't against external forces of change, but against the dissolution and reformulation of the self they've always known, the self tied to their present reality.
TO REFUSE an EXPERIENCE is to REFUSE THE PERSONS ASSOCIATED, WITH IT
We cannot help someone if we refuse the state they are in. In effect, it is to refuse to have that person as a customer.
People who refuse to experience their own state won't face the reality of their own inertia and resistance. Such people won't be customers.
To validate their refusal is to join them in their stasis. To refuse their state of plight is to refuse to serve them.
The true service is to lead them to dissolve the situation -- which means first, to lead them to confront their inertia and resistance — and to see their situation as one capable of being transformed. When the situation dissolves, the customer is released. They are no longer defined by their struggle, but by their capacity for change.
Resistance to change is virtually everywhere. Consider education, which many people resist as an unwelcome imposition. Education, like change, requires a shift in perspective, a willingness to dismantle old understandings and build new ones. It is a demand to move from one state of knowing to another. And people resist that because it implies a lack of self-control that we are unwilling to accept. It's fear of being controlled by another or by circumstances beyond our control.
So, how well do you accept and adapt to change? Think about the core situations of your own life. When faced with a change to your:
- money situation
- food situation
- sex situation
- work situation
- relationship situation
Do you double down on old habits and oppose change with everything we've got -- or do we grow with the situation? When your food situation changes, do you resist new dietary choices and routines, or do you try new foods and new ways to nourish yourself? Do you exercise your intelligence?
How do we adapt when a relationship -- sexual or otherwise -- shifts, requiring us to relax old boundaries or expectations so that our intelligence can rise to meet the change?
And what about our work situation. Do we feel angst in reaction to the unexpected? —are we defined by a rigid role, or are we "softly" defined, adaptable to new situations, challenges and opportunities?
The alternative to our inertia isn't some grand, imagined destination. The alternative is the moment-to-moment process of surrender (or creative interaction) — the willingness to let go of the familiar, to of the rigid hold on ourselves in our current situation, and open to the fluidity of, "what comes next?" It is in this releasing that we find not an end, but an alternative to inertia or resistance.
Flow.
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