Change is a small word, even a sonorous one, that hides discomforts, some almost unnoticed. It is also a symbol of at least one paradox: changing creates opportunity for movement, expansion and even development, but carries the risk, greater or lesser, of leaving the predictable for the unpredictable.

Reactions will be proportional to the experiences each person has had with change. Each small change contributes to building a repertoire for facing situations. The tendency of a good part of us is maintenance: of schedules, routes, foods, ways of making decisions, handling mistakes and approaching conflicts, among other things. The search for reasonable predictability is almost automatic, because the sense of security depends, to some degree, on knowing where I am and where I am going.

Change signals momentary instability and, in that sense, is understood by our system as a threat. And not changing often crystallizes the person inside a claustrophobic frame of reference, which creates a continuing need to distort reality to make it fit outdated beliefs and perceptions. Or, in more complex cases, it throws the person into inertia, easy prey for authoritarian manipulation.

It is no coincidence that the people most vulnerable to maneuvers by others describe themselves as conservative.

The emotional cost of keeping the boundaries of coexistence rigid and escaping any stimulus for change leads the person to a kind of blindness regarding themselves, other people and the different contexts. In fighting to maintain the old axioms, the person loses themselves and loses their connections with objective reality.

It is very rare for a person to perceive on their own the internal and external discomforts caused by this resistance. That is why responsibility, patience and persistence, along with compassion (so fundamental in everyday relationships and especially in instabilities), fall to whoever perceives.

The person who handles these issues with a more robust repertoire will have difficulty understanding the difficulty of the one who freezes. In the two corners of life’s board, one person will not easily understand the other. For one, the risk is not worth it; for the other, paralysis is a kind of death in life.

In each setting (family, organizations, schools, society in general), these movements happen with a similar basic choreography and different cultural frames, because it is a human phenomenon that affects us as a species. We tend toward balance, even when it is harmful. And we fear change, even when it heals. We can add to these considerations the spicy ingredient of speed.

Stimuli for change arrive at an ever faster pace. Hardly has one aspect stabilized when another appears demanding effort. Volatile times, volatile information, volatile relationships.

This leads people to another worrying movement: unthinking, automatic, superficial adherence, without awareness. It seems to me as worrying as exacerbated resistance, because it imprisons just the same. The image that invades my reflections is of a hamster moving inside its wheel. Automatism is a capricious jailer: it imprisons at the cost of immediate pleasure.

Like every human phenomenon, changes reach each person in a very particular way. Whoever manages them must have this view. They cannot be treated as a collective phenomenon; the stimulus, yes, will be collective.

The way each person will interpret and react to it will take different forms and paces. Therefore, respectful listening is called for. It is up to us to guarantee the person space to experiment, to take small steps, to prepare for the new times and movements. It is up to us to qualify each person’s repertoire and facilitate building the bridge between before and now.

Above all, it is not honest, when we speak of change, to compare ourselves with butterflies and their stages of transformation. We of our species have biology directed toward seeking, incessantly, homeostasis, the balance obtained through repetition of patterns. The butterfly is biologically equipped for change. In the caterpillar (the future butterfly) there are cells called imaginal cells, which are the basis of the process.

Imaginal cells are found alive and active throughout the time the caterpillar’s body dies by self-digestion. In the formation of the pupa, the next phase, a silky cocoon forms and inside it a protein soup of what remained of the caterpillar. In that soup, the imaginal cells find everything they need to create the new structure and carry out the different creation tasks: eyes, legs, wings, antennae... At the end of the process, the butterfly frees itself from the cocoon and takes flight.

We are not butterflies!

Each step toward the unknown is at first a painful destabilization followed by a momentary stabilization that anticipates the next destabilization. Over time, our biophysiological structure keeps reminding us of the previous stability, of the sensation (at times fantasized) of security.

Still, it is especially fundamental to update our patterns, because that will let us move along life’s very thin line with greater breadth and intensity.