Evolution

Sometimes things have to get worse before they can have a chance to get better. Ask anyone going through a home remodel, or chemotherapy, or the reinvention of a golf swing. What’s not great goes to awful enroute to pretty good. And mostly, we accept the detour the same way we accept flying from Oklahoma City to Dallas to get to Minnesota. We do what we need to do to get to where we want to be. Even though it usually takes much longer than we think it should. 

Regression is not an easy thing to bear.

When I transitioned from playing high school basketball to playing college basketball, the new coach encouraged an adjustment to the footwork of my shot. Intellectually, I could see the benefits of his way. All the reasons he laid out for doing it made sense. But my body balked. Even though I step-hopped up and down the dormitory hallway trying to build a new muscle memory pattern, for a long while I was a shell of the scorer I had been. The deterioration was painful. I believed that eventually the simplified footwork would make me more of an offensive triple threat. I had faith that my shot would get quicker and cleaner. Still, I railed against the backward slide. 

Every pictorial plot of progress reveals a line that spikes and dives incessantly as it jags its way across the page. We know what the erratic map looks like from an over-the-shoulder glance. But when we’re in it – when we’re in the middle of a cliff dive that we knowingly signed up for – the plummet messes with our head. A part of us sort of wishes that we’d left well enough alone.

Perhaps that’s why so many things that don’t really work anymore are allowed to keep limping along. The “worse” we’d have to go through to get to “better” doesn’t feel like an even trade.

The prospect of transformation is a spooky one. It’s like a haunted house – appealing and terrifying all at the very same time. Sometimes we make alterations because we have to. The world will devour us if we don’t. And sometimes changing is a choice. We don’t have to but we choose to because we know there must be a sweeter, more effective way. Regardless (or “irregardless” as the teacher who taught next door to me used to say) the road is a lonely one, even though we might be surrounded by friends who hold us as we scream. Usually about halfway in, we question why we ever bought a ticket in the first place, as the only thing we can think about is how to get back to the safe familiarity of where we were.

The courage that’s required to break a thing on purpose is different from the courage that’s required to build it back a different way. But evolution begs for both. It needs the varying shades of audacity as well as all the passion, daring, insight, effort and good old-fashioned stubborn guts that one can muster. Two-steps-forward-three-steps-back is a counterintuitive road to hoe. But it’s the way to get to better than we ever could have dreamed.


P.S. The Evolution of Music

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In Pursuit of Beautiful