Passivity Is the Enemy of Change
If you wait to be rescued, your life will never change
You may be familiar with this joke:
The weather service sends out a warning to the people in a coastal town that there is going to be a huge storm surge, and they should evacuate to higher ground. A man refuses to leave his home, and insists God will save him.
The storm surge comes, and the waters rise higher and higher. Eventually, the first floor of the man’s house floods, then the second floor, and finally the attic. The man is able to crawl out onto his roof.
Some of his neighbors float by, clinging to a downed tree, and call to the man to join them. If they all kick together, they can steer the tree to safety. The man declines, and insists God will save him.
A short time later, some other neighbors paddle by in a row boat, and call to the man to jump into the water. They can pull him into their boat and row him to safety. The man tells them to save their energy for the people who need their help. He is confident that God will save him.
As night falls, and the water continues to inch upward, a rescue helicopter flies overhead. Their searchlight picks out the man, clinging to the very top edge of his roof, and they shout through a bullhorn, “We’ll drop a ladder to you, and you can climb to safety.” The man waves them off, because God will save him.
Sometime during the night, the man drowns. When he goes to Heaven and meets God, he asks, “Why didn’t you save me?”
God replies, “I warned you, then sent you a log, a boat, and a helicopter. Why didn’t you take my help?”
The point of the joke, is that people who wait passively for someone else to rescue them do not get rescued. They have to take some action to rescue themselves. Otherwise, nothing changes.
People in abusive relationships have to take action to leave the relationship.
People addicted to drugs or alcohol have to take action to kick their habit.
People stuck in a cycle of mindless drudgery at minimum wage jobs have to take action to break that cycle.
There are resources available, and people willing to help, but the first step must come from the person in need of rescue.
I have a friend who believes that the entire New Age movement is designed to make people passive and unwilling to take that first step. He thinks that it is geared toward creating a population that feel good about themselves while everything goes to h*ll in a hand basket around them.
There’s some truth to this. After all, look at all the people who think that the way to health, wealth, and prosperity is to use the Law of Attraction to magically summon these things into their lives.
No matter how many affirmations you recite and visualizations you do, if that is all you do, nothing will ever change. You need to take action, even if it’s a tiny action, to move in the direction you wish to go.
Self-help guru Mike Dooley calls these “baby steps”.
However, there is a flip side to this as well. Consider all the people who have a positive change in their life — winning a lottery, meeting the person of their dreams, getting a lucky break at work. But they haven’t done the internal work to shift their attitudes and behaviors.
They end up bankrupt, divorced, and out of a job.
So the truth of the matter lies somewhere between these two extremes. You need to do some inner work, to change how you interact with the world. And you also need to take actions in that world.
If you wait passively for someone else to change your world, you’ll be waiting for a very long time. You’ll probably die before it happens.
On the other hand, if you passively accept that you are who you are, and that’s just how it is, you also won’t see lasting change. Any change that occurs will be fleeting, and you’ll eventually go back to where you were before the change.
Passivity is the enemy of change. If you want anything to change, you must take action.
Conclusion
If you want to see real, lasting change in your world, you need to do two things.
- Work on yourself so that you can accept the change when it happens.
- Work in the world, so that you can take advantage of the help and resources offered to you.
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