The path of evolution? Embracing change
Seeking the 'edge effect’ and learning to welcome entropy
📺 I was back critiquing on MasterChef: The Professionals last week — you can catch-up on BBC iPlayer.
Hi! This is Leyla from A Day Well Spent, a newsletter seeking pathways to more purposeful living.
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I recently came across a quote attributed to Coco Chanel that I very much liked. She once said, “a woman who cuts her hair is about to change her life.”
It made me smile because I did just that. I cut my hair short (to the style you see today) back in 2018, within a month of getting married. I didn’t know it at the time, but the chop served as a catalyst for an upward gear change in my career.
Chanel’s quote made me think about change in general. There’s been quite a lot of it in my life, mostly instigated by me, and I think it’s been the key player in my evolution as a person.
“She needs to move with the times”
The other day I was heading to a TV studio in a taxi, with a BBC Radio station on in the background. The presenter was inviting listeners to call in and share a topic close to their heart that they believed the BBC should be reporting on.
A woman living in rural Scotland dialled in. At the end of the line she was lamenting over the fact that high street branches of banks were closing down across the country, making it difficult for the elderly to manage their finances.
She explained that many people her age (she was 82) don’t know how to use online banking and because of this, a queue forms outside the only high-street branch remaining in her area, 30 minutes before it even opens, with some customers having travelled 10 miles to visit it.
I nodded along in solidarity to the anguish in the woman’s voice. But the taxi driver? He was less sympathetic. I roughly placed him in his 60s.
“Things change,” he scoffed. “She needs to move with the times. We all have to adapt and change, we all have to evolve. If not, you become stagnant. You get left behind.”
He raises a good point, I thought.
We are terrified of entropy
entropy (noun) a process of degradation,
running down
or a trend to disorderI especially love Mathematician James R. Newman’s definition of entropy as, ‘the general trend of the universe towards death and disorder.’
Our houses fall apart, food rots, we see signs of aging in the mirror. Even though this is completely natural and the order of things, we don’t like it. This is why we invent preservatives, ‘forever chemicals’ and plastics that never break down.
Because we don’t want anything to change, we’re terrified of it.
But we are misguided in our fears, because entropy is necessary for life.
Things must come apart and disintegrate — there needs to be ‘death and disorder’, there must be change – in order for new life to form.
None of us would be here if stars didn’t die
You’ve probably heard of the poetic turn of phrase, we are made from stardust.
It comes from the fact that most of the elements we can find in our bodies – carbon, calcium, iron, oxygen, magnesium, sodium, potassium, almost all of them1 – were created inside stars, before the Earth even existed.
When these first stars eventually died and exploded in the process, those elements were dispersed throughout the Universe. Some of those elements ended up inside you. And the cycle continues.
The basic building blocks of everything in and around us were made in a star, so we are deeply connected to all things. Nothing survives in isolation in Nature. We talk about a ‘flower’ and ‘water’ and ‘soil’ for convenience, but none of these can exist as they do without the others.
Science does not describe things, it explains relationships. As British-born American anthropologist Gregory Bateson once said, ‘all division of the world into things is arbitrary.’
None of us would be here if stars didn’t die.
Life happens at the edge
Without change, there can be no growth. And as with most things in life, we need look no further than at Nature for lessons in this.
Nature is always in flux. Just like waste doesn’t exist in Nature (there are no refuse workers in the forest), neither does stagnancy. No two moments are the same, even if the change happens so slowly we can barely perceive it.
Energy is perpetually on the move. Systems (weather, geological, digestive, eco, and everything else) are forever in motion. Water carries more oxygen when it is flowing – where there is movement, there is life.
The very act of living, the expansion of life itself, happens at the boundaries and the edges2, where two different media or ecosystems meet.
The ‘edge effect’ is an ecological concept that describes why a richer variety of life and healthy growth are observed at the edges where two different environments overlap, more so than when looking at either environment on its own.
For example, along outcrops of exposed rock and cliffs, where forested areas border clearings and where estuaries meet the ocean. It’s at these edges you’ll find some of the greatest diversity and abundance of organisms on Earth.
In the online yoga tutorials I follow, at the hold of every pose, the instructor says, ‘find your edge’. It took me some time to appreciate what he fully meant by this.
Nature is always trying to increase its edge
A cell will expand to increase its surface area and upon reaching a point of instability, it divides into two stable forms again, now with a larger combined surface area (or edge).
Resources are exchanged across these edges — things that are needed (e.g. nutrients) and things to be removed (e.g. waste). By maximising the surface area (or edge), Nature increases the efficiency of these interactions and in turn, the health of the organism (or system) as a whole.
Plus, more edge means change happens quicker. This is why we cut a potato into smaller pieces before we roast it.
It’s for these reasons Nature is always trying to increase its edge.
And because we are part of Nature (as opposed to separate from it), we are no different. Most of our living happens when we traverse the boundary, when our environment is in flux, when circumstances switch, when we embrace the change.
When we break down into smaller pieces, we increase our own surface area, creating more opportunities for growth and evolution.
If the caterpillar did not welcome its metamorphosis, it would never have achieved its full potential of becoming the beautiful butterfly.
The only real guarantee in life is that nothing lasts forever
I have always loved a bit of enforced change. The kind of change that you have little say over, where fewer options can be a good thing. Because in these situations, what else is there left to do other than, welcome it?
This kind of change can be quite freeing.
When a friend recently told me she’d been made redundant (with a juicy redundancy package), I squealed with delight.
“Oh my goodness,” I enthused. “How exciting is that!”
“You’ve now got the time and space to think about and genuinely pursue the change in career you’ve been dreaming of, forever!’
Alas, I don’t think she quite saw it like that.
If the laws of Nature and the Universe state that change is inevitable — whether we like it or not — perhaps we would do well to learn to embrace more of it.
If something is no longer how it once was – a job, a relationship, circumstances, your knees – there is wisdom in just going with what is, rather than fighting it.
Buddhists are pretty good at this
They are all about active acceptance. About not resisting the moment. Simply observing and being at peace with what is happening right now and open to what unfolds.
To be clear, this is very different to giving up, passively resigning to an outcome or taking no action (none of which are encouraged by Buddhist practice — and I am the biggest fan of action).
It's about recognizing that all things change and making space for this fact of life. It is this acceptance that can lead to peace, resilience and personal growth.
Change can be scary but it can also stimulate us out of stagnancy. As my yoga guy says, go ‘find your edge’.
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