Dibya Choudhuri

Anyone who has travelled in the last decade has had the experience of plans being disrupted at the last moment, whether it’s the child suddenly getting sick the day before, to sitting in an airplane and finding it’s not going anywhere. We may be anxious in response, preparing ahead for any possible eventuality while fearing we cannot. We get insurance, we tell people, we might update our will, we carry a change of clothes in a carryon…and so on. But we tried to be prepared.

Currently, it is all in flux. We are all in mid-travel, up in the air, on the road, in the water, and really not sure where or when we are going and what an arrival point looks like. We don’t know what behaviors are required, suggested, and how to carry them out. Should we mask/unmask; when/where/how; be unvaccinated, fully vaccinated or get ongoing boosters; virus variants that bring the world both closer together and further apart in experience; in person or remote; climate change or climate disaster; social chaos or dismantling systems of oppression.

Even when we feel things are looking up, we now always have to wait for another shoe to drop. This global experience brings it home to us that we are not in control, and in fact have never been so though we self-comforted by thinking we could prepare ahead through predicting the future. This up and down, topsy turvy, quaking, burning, chilling, storming world, where a sniffle can be the precursor to the common cold or life-threatening illness, where intimacy can infect you or comfort you, can feel like an immersive virtual simulation exercise.

Flourishing in mutability, requires clear sight on what will be workable right now, anticipating as much as possible beforehand and building in support structures that can weather the earthquakes, wildfires, and hurricanes.

We’re trying to anticipate what lies ahead by plugging in all we think we know about today’s reality. But the more we’re all immersed in instability, the less information we have about what’s to come

A word I have started using to describe this state is mutability, carrying the implication of a state that is changeable and perhaps less negative than chaos. The future is larger and more complicated than our past experience. It’s accepting that the state is in constant transition. There is no normal to return to because the future does not move in reverse, despite nostalgia and bitter clinging to fragmented certainties of place and space and status.

But the last two years have prepared us for this mutability, to grow new muscles and reactions and habits we didn’t have before. We’ve become a bit more accepting of discomfort, of conflict, and of not knowing. Our new word for navigating this mutable landscape may be motility which is the quality or state of being capable of movement.

Some points about mutability:

• Ambiguity comes from the Latin Ambi, meaning both. Rather than if/then options, motility requires us to respond from a “both/and” stance so we can be more than the problem.
• We need to be able to roll with the changes, but not in a reactive way. Since we live now in such a contextual, interdependent world, we must think intersectionally about our responses so that we do not cause a cascade effect of disaster in trying to solve problems independently.
• We can use our new understanding of mutability, to begin to anticipate possibilities rather than simply strive to navigate through the rapids.
• Finally, as we have struggled with all the changes, I’m sure that many have heard or said it ourselves, “In a perfect world…” What usually follows is a commentary of how things should be. Christian Conte, a psychologist in California, describes this as the mismatch when we have a view of a Cartoon World where everything goes according to our best expectations, versus our disappointment when what ends up happening in the Real World doesn’t match the cartoon in our heads. We need to let go of the belief in a perfect world and focus instead on today! Our ideal world often exists in a nostalgic mythic past, and we need to let it go. It didn’t really exist before, it certainly doesn’t exist now, and the landscapes we live in are not going to go back to some “normal”. There will also be no new normal which suggests stability.

We can use our new understanding of mutability, to begin to anticipate possibilities rather than simply strive to navigate through the rapids.

Flourishing in mutability, requires clear sight on what will be workable right now, anticipating as much as possible beforehand and building in support structures that can weather the earthquakes, wildfires, and hurricanes.