Implementing change

Implementing change is a challenge to all of us, and it seems to get worse as we get older. It becomes harder to make any change part of our everyday reality, particularly when life is busy and stressful. It's as if we are trains, moving along rails from A to B without the ability to take a different route. Like trains we have become fixed, established - and frequently late!

This fixedness is a kind of paralysis, which is a state I have been putting a lot of thought into recently due to a lecture I delivered.  Physical paralysis can have many forms, from MS and muscular dystrophy to nerve damage and motor neurone disease, but the end results are similar - fixedness, stiffness, weakness and immovability. Is there a relationship between these physical states and mental and emotional attitudes?

Some illumination can be gained by looking at the human condition. Paralysis and lack of mobility tend to increase with age, as any visit to a care home will demonstrate. As we get older, our joints stiffen and our muscles lose strength. Our flexibility and our response times both diminish, and towards the end of life we become more static and inflexible. This is paralleled by a change in our mental and emotional capacities - we become less tolerant, less open-minded, more inclined to ignore the new and to dwell in the past. In other words, our thought processes mirror our physical deterioration, in an overall move towards a more rigid, inflexible, and static stance.

And yet, as babies we are almost the polar opposite. We are physically flexible and pliable, we respond quickly to stimuli, and at the same time we are open minded and fascinated by the new.

It seems possible then that there is a relationship between our physical mobility and our mental flexibility. Retaining this adaptability and resisting stiffness and rigidity seem therefore to be essential to living a fulfilling life for as many years as possible. This makes my decision to start yoga last year even more sensible than I thought at the time!

So what can we do to retain our mental agility?

·        Stay in touch with new ideas and new ways of thinking. This can be in your chosen area of interest, or more generally in terms of culture and politics.

·        Identify an area in your life in which your inflexibility limits your choices. For example, if you never travel because you can only sleep in your own bed, start to push the boundaries of this fixedness. You could visit somewhere for only one night to begin with.

·        Make a commitment to learning something new. It could be a new language if you want to do something big, or just mastering an aspect of your digital life that seemed out of your reach.

·        Remember to notice when you have done something new, and pat yourself on the back. The experience should be positive, and add something to your life. If not, try something else - it's not a failure, you have just learned something new about yourself. I tried doing my own repairs on my vehicle many years ago. I learnt how to change sparkplugs - but I also learnt that I hate working with dirty oily metal things!

·        Try to imagine what it is like to be someone else. Ask them how it feels and try to 'walk in their shoes'. A change of perspective can really free you and enables you to develop tolerance and open-mindedness.

I hope some of these ideas work for you .I personally am shocked by how stiff my body has become over the last 20 years, and am determined to resist the same process in my mind!