Adapting to Change: Why Do We Expect Ourselves to Stay the Same?

Fall is a perfect time to enjoy the beautiful colours in our country.

Consistency does not have to mean sameness.

There is something interesting that happens when a routine, habit, or way of living that once came fairly easily begins to feel harder. Most of us do not immediately become curious about what may have changed around us or within our lives; instead, we tend to turn the attention inward and begin correcting ourselves. We tell ourselves that we have become lazy, that we have lost our motivation, that we should be doing better, or that we need to get ourselves back to the person we were when everything seemed to work more smoothly. Sometimes we even use criticism quite deliberately because we have learned that if we make ourselves uncomfortable enough, ashamed enough, or disappointed enough, we may be able to force ourselves back into action. That can work for a little while, but it can also do the opposite and leave us feeling so discouraged that we stop altogether. Either way, it is worth recognizing that criticism can become a strategy we use on ourselves, and a strategy is not necessarily the truth.

Before deciding that we are the problem, there may be a much more useful place to begin, and that is by asking what has actually changed. That question is not an excuse for giving up on ourselves, and it is not permission to accept every loss of strength, interest, energy, or capability as inevitable. There are times when we absolutely do need to push a little harder, investigate our health, change something in our lifestyle, or recommit to something that we know supports us. There are also times when the method we have been using no longer fits the life we are living, and if we do not learn to tell the difference between those two situations, we can spend an enormous amount of time either forcing ourselves into an outdated pattern or abandoning something valuable because the old way became inconvenient.

I think one of the reasons this is so difficult is that we often forget how our routines were created in the first place. A routine usually begins as a solution. We want more movement, better nourishment, more rest, more organization, more time outside, more connection, or a way to make something important fit into the day, so we create a pattern around it. Eventually, the pattern becomes so familiar that we stop seeing it as a solution and begin treating it almost like a rule. The purpose and the method become tangled together, and when the method stops working, we assume the whole commitment has failed. This is where consistency can become unnecessarily rigid, because consistency does not have to mean doing the same thing in exactly the same way forever; it can mean remaining committed to what matters while allowing the way we support that commitment to change.

Take something as simple as an evening walk. Perhaps you began walking because you wanted more movement, better circulation, time outside, some relief from the day, or because you noticed that you felt better after you had moved your body for a while. Seven o'clock worked because supper was finished, it was still light, the temperature was pleasant, and the timing fit naturally into your life, so over time the seven-o'clock walk became the routine. Then the season changed, the evenings became darker, perhaps your schedule shifted as well, and suddenly the same walk that once seemed effortless became harder to maintain. It would be very easy at that point to tell yourself that you had lost discipline, but the seven-o'clock walk was never really the important part; it was the answer you had created to meet a need. Once we remember that, we are no longer stuck trying to force the old answer to work under new conditions. We can go back to the original reason, decide whether it still matters, and if it does, create a new version that fits the life we are actually living now.

That is where I think the difference between resistance and mismatch becomes very useful. Resistance is what happens when something still makes sense, still supports us, and still fits reasonably well, but we do not feel like doing it. There are days when that is exactly what is going on, and no amount of redesigning the routine will help because what is really needed is follow-through. Mismatch is different because the method itself no longer suits the conditions in which we are trying to use it. If we mistake mismatch for laziness, we may spend months criticizing ourselves for not being able to maintain a structure that needs to evolve, while if we call every bit of resistance a mismatch, we can change direction every time something becomes difficult and never allow a good habit to become established. Learning to tell the difference is part of learning how to work with change instead of either fighting it automatically or surrendering to it too quickly.

This is also where I want to be careful with the way we talk about cycles, because the idea that life moves in cycles can be very helpful, but it can also become another way of explaining away something that deserves our attention. We often hear people say that a change is “just age,” “just the season,” or “just where I am in life,” and sometimes that may be true, but sometimes it ends the investigation too soon. I have met older people who have tremendous energy, curiosity, and involvement in life, and younger people who already feel as though their world has become very small. Age on its own does not tell us enough. Our nourishment matters, our movement matters, our health matters, our sense of purpose matters, our relationships matter, and having something ahead of us that still feels interesting and worth participating in matters. A change may be asking us to adapt, but it may also be asking us to investigate, recommit, or let go of something that no longer belongs, and the important part is learning not to assume the answer before we have asked the question properly.

Older traditions understood this idea of transition in ways that I think modern life often forgets. In Ayurveda, for example, there is a long-standing tradition of adjusting food, routines, and daily living as the seasons change rather than assuming that exactly the same practices should suit the entire year. Traditional Japanese calendars divided the year into many smaller seasonal periods rather than only four large seasons, paying attention to subtle changes in plants, weather, animals and the environment as they happened. I do not think we need to adopt every traditional practice in order to appreciate the wisdom behind the observation, which is that change usually does not happen all at once. It introduces itself slowly. The light changes a little, the temperature shifts, something in our routine begins to feel different, one responsibility fades, and another becomes more important, and by the time we finally say that everything has changed, the change may have been showing itself to us for weeks or months.

Mother Nature is particularly good at demonstrating that transition does not mean failure. A tree does not become unsuccessful because its leaves change colour and fall, and a garden does not become useless because the harvest ends. Energy is being directed differently, conditions are changing, and another part of the cycle is beginning. Human beings are obviously not trees, and we do not need to imitate nature literally, but there is something valuable in remembering that growth does not always look like expansion. There are times when growth looks like recovery, reevaluation, consolidation, or creating enough space to decide what belongs in the next part of our lives. The mistake is not changing; the mistake is allowing change to happen entirely on automatic pilot so that we slowly give up things that still matter to us without ever consciously deciding to do so.

This is why I think it is useful to go back to purpose whenever something begins to change. Instead of asking only whether we can still maintain the old routine, we can ask why we created it, what it was giving us, whether that still matters, and what has changed in the circumstances around it. Sometimes the answer will be that the original purpose no longer matters, and we are maintaining a habit because it is familiar. Sometimes the purpose still matters very much, but the method needs to evolve. Sometimes nothing substantial has changed at all, and we need to recommit. The important thing is that we make the choice consciously rather than assuming that repeating the old pattern is always proof of discipline or that abandoning it is always proof of failure.

There is another part of this that I think matters as we move through different stages of life, and that is whether the changes we are making are helping us remain engaged, capable, and interested in our own lives or whether they are slowly making our world smaller. Adaptation should not automatically mean doing less. Sometimes the next version is better, more interesting or more effective than the old one. We may change the time of an activity and discover that we enjoy it more, change the way we work and find that we have more energy for the part of the work that actually matters, or let go of something that has been taking up space and suddenly have room for something that fits us much better now. There will certainly be periods when recovery means doing less, and there will be others when the healthiest choice is to challenge ourselves more, but neither should be decided by a rule. It takes awareness to know which one we are being asked to do.

That brings me back to the question that I think is one of the most valuable in this entire conversation: What in my life still deserves my commitment but needs a new way of being done? I think that question is worth returning to regularly because it works in almost every area of life. It can apply to the way we move, the way we eat, the way we work, the way we care for our relationships, the way we run our homes, the way we restore ourselves, and the expectations we carry about who we are supposed to be. Sometimes the answer will be that nothing needs to change. Sometimes it will reveal that we have been using the same solution long after the conditions that created it disappeared. Sometimes it will show us that we are calling something “change” when what we really need is to recommit. The value is not in forcing one answer; it is in asking the question honestly enough that we can recognize the answer when it comes.

As we move through the equinox and into another part of the yearly cycle, I do not think we need to reinvent ourselves because the season is changing. What may be worthwhile is paying attention to what has already begun shifting and asking whether the way we are living still supports what matters to us. We do not need to become the person we were last year or five years ago in order to be consistent with who we are. We need to remember what still matters, recognize the conditions we are living in now, and be willing to create the version of our routines, commitments, and choices that belongs to this part of our lives.

Consistency does not have to mean sameness.

It can mean remaining loyal to what matters while becoming wise enough to let the way we get there evolve.