Instant

(On time, transformation, and the beautiful lie of self-reliance)

Change comes slowly, you say.
It takes years to fundamentally alter oneself,
to come to a new understanding of one’s place in the world.

I disagree. Change comes in a moment.
We are one way,
and in the briefest measure of time,
we become other than we were before.
It’s the lead-up to the change that seems to take forever.

We pace.
We mull.
We retreat from possibilities.
We relent from acting on what we know we must one day do.

Something unexpected happens.
And in that moment we are never the same.

A phone call from a friend: I need you—please come quickly.
The birth of a child: I am now responsible in a way I have never been.
Birth’s opposite: I must now fend for myself in a world remade.
A sudden brush with terror: My sense of safety is gone.
The appearance of new love: I’ve been granted entry into a more beautiful world.

These moments remake us.
They remake us in exactly no time at all—literally no time.
We have only our memories of what was,
and our imaginings of what’s to come.
In that flicker, we are transformed, in large or small ways,
for the rest of our lives.

What if our efforts toward change aren’t too little?
What if they are too much?
We know that some things require delicacy,
reserve,
containment.
What if there is too much self-reliance?

What if we’ve been taught to believe
that everything we hold and cherish
is the result of our competency—
or worse, withheld through our lack of competency?
Is that not how we’ve been acculturated to believe?
What if that is wrong?

I’m not suggesting we abandon growth—
the development of skills,
the cultivation of expertise.
I believe those things are merely containers.
Without them,
we are fetching water with hole-punctured buckets.

To see ourselves as independent,
self-reliant,
autonomous
is a badge of honor, we think.
I think it is also the cause of desperate loneliness.

No one does anything alone.
Nothing has ever been accomplished by a single individual.
A solo record is never a solo record.
There are a thousand players,
a thousand helpers,
a thousand teachers,
a thousand lovers,
a thousand betrayers,
a thousand friends,
a thousand words of kindness
and of scorn in every song.

More than this is the miracle of our own sentience.
Our very existence.
Our ability to see,
feel, smell,
taste,
touch,
hear.
And our other senses:
insight, intuition, prayerfulness, playfulness,
protectiveness, nurturance, love.
None of this is a result of our own doing.

Some have learned—as I have, and later rejected—
that the world functions on its own,
that there is no Creative Force save for randomness,
or a never-explained “order from disorder”
over incalculable lengths of time.
Time itself becomes a stand-in for God.
This belief, too, stems from our assumptions about autonomy,
about freedom,
about freedom from “organized” religion.

Even as—perhaps especially as—an observant Jew,
I reject the idea of organized religion.
I do so in the same way I reject the idea of organized music.
Who can harness an ineffable Creator?
Who can circumscribe the boundlessness of music?
That doesn’t mean there aren’t guidelines and ordinances for each.
Everything we encounter holds both organization
and the counterweight of freedom from that organization.
This is the nature of all things:
structure underpinning freedom;
form in which freedom lives.

It is from the idea that we alone move our lives—
that we are the sole manifestors of our existence—
that we are tempted to believe
that change demands years of hard work,
study, achievement.
This is why real change, whether personal or cosmic,
becomes no more than a dream-like impossibility.
We’ve been misled to think that instantaneous change,
for ourselves and for the world,
must wait for some distant future,
must come about through far-off political means,
governmental means,
or —warlike means.

I see change as a light switch.
I imagine every person, all at once,
finding their own switch and turning it on.
In one moment, liberated from the darkness
to which we had become inured,
humanity would gasp at the simplicity of it,
weep for the joy of it,
and exult with great gales
of laughter and praisesong.

I keep at least one guitar
in perfect tune at all times,
for just that occasion.