Turkeys and Change

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his best-selling The Black Swan, provides an instructive analogy. A turkey is fed and watered for 364 days, so the turkey would be justified in assuming (if it could assume anything at all) that the 365^th day would be like all the others. Conditions may continue for a very long time but, as demonstrated by Thanksgiving Day, to say nothing of the current revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East, they don’t last forever.

In a recent broadcast of Krista Tippett’s interview with the physician Jon Kabat-Zinn, he spoke of our “somnambulism.” The founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, he said that we go through life without realizing that change is the basic condition of life, that stability is illusory. For years our homes and our retirement portfolios increased in value and we assumed they would continue to do so. We extrapolated those trends into the indefinite future, so the Great Recession shocked us. We were unprepared for the change.

Aging is, of course, a universal product of change. So why are we surprised to find these changes operating in ourselves? Sometimes we rail against them, sometimes we even deny them. We’ve seen our grandparents and our parents age but somehow don’t expect that our own old age will be accompanied by some of the same physical, emotional, and mental changes.

The 365^th day will arrive for all of us, but in the meantime, our last years will not be like the last days of the turkey, which are more or less all the same except for a continual increase in its weight. Year by year, our medications and visits to doctors increase just as our strength and energy decline. Yet at the same time, we have greater opportunity for reflection, greater opportunity to reach out to others, greater opportunity to consider our actions and to be mindful of our surroundings, and best of all, greater opportunity to appreciate the wonder and glory of being alive. If change is a necessary condition of life, it’s worth it.