Change

Everything changes and nothing stands still – Heraclitus, about 500 BC

I like to think of myself as a person who has comfortably made many significant changes in my lifetime. I have changed my educational interest from forestry, to food science, to engineering, to math, to computer science. I've changed the place I lived from New Jersey, to California, to Massachusetts, to Italy, back to Massachusetts, to living in an RV, to Florida. In my professional life I was, in a small way, an agent of change, since I spent most of those years helping a computer research project grow into the Internet. I spent about 15 years with professional help learning to exchange the personality traits I developed as a child for personality traits more useful as a father and husband, and I think the end product of that effort is reasonably good. I made a big change from a full time management job to retirement without much angst. All in all, change has been good for me and I believe I've adapted to most changes pretty well.

Yet there are a few areas of my life where change has been shockingly difficult for me. A clear example is when the company I worked for changed its telephone system from a manually operated switchboard to to a modern computer-controlled system. This change made possible all sorts of new features such as call forwarding, conference calls, voice mail, etc. But the new system eliminated an aspect of the old system I had grown to rely on, the ability of an operator to page me by radio and tell me that an important customer wanted to talk to me. Rather than finding a way to adapt to the new system I made a fool of myself resisting it, and treating the people responsible for installing it as personal enemies. After a long period of angry behavior and unpleasantness on my part I did, of course, adapt to the new telephone system, although I never tried to make use of most of its considerable capabilities. The system still made me angry whenever I thought about it; fortunately I thought about it less and less.

Since I worked in a leading edge computer system company, the computer tools we used changed every few years to keep up with new developments in hardware and software. Every one of these changes was very difficult for me. Instead of focusing on the added capabilities made possible by a new system, I spent my time and energy focused on the things that used to be easy to do which now had become more difficult. There were never very many such things, but there were always a few. I wasted a lot of mental energy fretting about them, and my complaints and resistance made life difficult for the people who worked for me and had to manage the new systems. Even today, when there is a new release of software used on my personal computer I find myself in the same mode of anger, resistance, and complaining; these days it is usually my son and my daughter-in-law, the family computer experts, who bear the brunt of my difficulty accepting the change.

Why is this so? How does it happen that I have been able to accommodate so many changes, and yet occasionally find areas which I find so hard to deal with? I've thought about this a lot over the past few years, and I've reached two tentative conclusions.

First, changes I find difficult are often ones where I have no control over the situation. Something becomes obsolete, and the people responsible for supporting it decide the future will be better if the obsolete thing is replaced with something newer, better, and usually different. They don't consult me – they issue a statement that next month the old one will be gone and the new one will take its place. Whether training or “test drives” to help with learning about the new thing are available or not, it is up to me to conform to the schedule of someone else. This creates a feeling of powerlessness that I find extremely uncomfortable.

Second, the changes require me to learn new things, and raise a fear that I might no longer be able to learn what is needed. I am able to use the telephone adequately today; will the people around me discover that I am no longer capable when the new telephones are installed? I am an “expert” in the use of today's computer system; will I be able to continue to be an “expert” in using the new system? If I can't learn to use a new system as well as others, will I lose status? Will I become a laughingstock? Will I be put out to pasture? None of these things happened the last time there was a change, but that doesn't seem to help me much when thinking about the next change. I guess my self-esteem in this area is fairly low.

Fortunately, in my present life I don't feel any great need for a smart phone, a DVR, or any of the other technological changes that feel so threatening to me. We will see what change the future holds in store.

Addendum: I now have a DVR, but still no smart phone. October 2021

Written as an assignment for the writers' group at The Fountains in January 2017.  The assigned topis was "change".