Release yourself from the pressure of being consistent
Take all the things you think about consistency and judge them.
Analyse them. See if you can figure out what's beneath the idea of consistency…
Is it a craving for certainty? To have something to fall back on? To feel like the slack is going to be picked up?
Is that feeling of pride that runs through you, knowing that people think you're reliable? Even if you're exhausted and not telling the truth?
Is it about predictability? And being about predictability, is there trauma in your life around the chaos of situations you've found yourself in?
The feeling of powerlessness? That the rug could get pulled out from underneath you at any moment?
Often, what drives a thirst for consistency is a fear of the unknown, the belief that change is hard, that what we lose may not be replaced by what we gain.
We long for uniformity, order, and predictability, not necessarily because we believe that they're better, but because we've suffered through chaos and surprise and matters beyond our control before, and we're not sure we can do it again.
But friend, imagine I'm grabbing you lovingly by the shoulders and looking into your eyes:
You cannot avoid chaos. You cannot dodge surprise. You cannot make life play by the rules because there are no rules, and nothing is certain.
You can not ever be sure exactly how things will work out.
Everything is a leap of faith. So the problem is not the nature of change, or the nature of earth, or even, the nature of humanity.
Somewhere along the way, we've come to the belief that change is hard, that failure is final, and that truth is static. They are not.
When we begin to nurture and care for our relationship with change, a shift begins to happen.
You were never meant to be consistent to form and function. How can you? Everything changes… you cannot garden the same, eat the same, dress the same, feel the same all the year through.
As you mature and age, your body will change, it will bend and evolve and it will strengthen and it will soften and it will know that nothing stays the same. This knowing is a freedom, not an indictment.
Grace is that change comes to free us from who we thought we were, from who we thought God was, from who we thought The Other was, from what we thought life would be.
And most often, that change is what saves us, if we're open to it.
What if, instead, we turned our ideas of consistency inward? What if we placed it in the centre of our being, not at the edge of our fingertips?
If we took it from things like belief and practices and action and the direction of our lives and gave it instead to things like openness, willingness, grace, and courage?
What if we consistently sought truth? Not the kind that you put on a shelf and bow down to every day, but the kind that unfolds and unwinds just like we do? The kind that rises with the sun and shines with the moon?
The kind that you don't know is true until you experience it? Until it whispers from deep within you? Until it gets your attention through your body?
What if we consistently allowed ourselves to be loved? What if we consistently nursed our trauma into health? What if we consistently practised living where we are with what we have instead of wishing and regretting?
There is a place for consistency, but it shouldn't be about the things that we do in the sense they always stay the same rather, it should live beneath all that we do, nestled in our values, opening us up to truth.
Affirmation: Consistency is less about doing and being the same, and more about being available to your own life wherever you are, and whatever you're in.
Written by Liz Milani
Instagram: @thepracticeco
From this week’s guest series "The Virtue of Inconsistency" this week, with a subscription, in the App.
