“How to Turn Your Life and the World Around in 75 Years or Less”
By Rev. Dr. James Kubal-Komoto
Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church
Des Moines, Washington
January 11, 2009

             There are so many stories about people making or undergoing dramatic changes in their lives.

            In the Bible, specifically in Acts in Christian scripture, there is the story of Saul traveling on the road to Damascus. According to the scripture, it only takes a bright flash of light and a big, booming voice from the sky to instantly convert Saul the persecutor of Christians into Paul the apostle of Jesus on the road to Damascus.

            In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the transformation of Ebeneezer Scrooge only takes all of one night, and from one perspective, this total transformation of his personality, values, and behavior even happens while he is asleep.

            In hundreds of TV shows, films, short-stories, novels, there are so many stories of people suddenly and dramatically changing their lives after some epiphany or other life-changing event.

            This idea of the possibility of sudden, dramatic change is very prevalent in our society today.

            Don’t believe me?

            I was recently in a Barnes and Nobles bookstore. It was right after the New Year, and there were tables and tables and tables of books about dieting, about exercising, about relationships, about finances, and about various other self-help topics, and they were all promising the same thing: “A Whole New You in 30 Days or Less.”

            In thirty days or less, these books promised, you can be thin, rich, have a great sex life, well-behaved children, and organized closets.

            There’s something a little sad about the thriving sales of self-help books. Americans spend millions of dollars on self-help books, year after year, always in search of that elusive secret that will help them turn around their lives.

            Most of us, I think, start a new year with hope for our lives, with hope for the possibility of change. We start off a new year with such good intentions. I live close to a Bally Fitness Club - - I drive by it every day - - and the parking lot is never so full as it is the first week of a new year. Yet, research shows that 80 percent of people who make New Year resolutions give up on them by Valentine’s Day, if not sooner.

            It seems there’s a price to pay for this. A few years ago a British researcher calculated that for most people, on average, January 24, is the “Worst Day of the Year.” He based this prediction on the weather, the fact that the holidays are over and there isn’t much to look forward too in the near future, and that by this date, most people have given up on their New Year’s resolutions and are feeling down about themselves and their lives.

            The truth of the matter seems to be that very few people are successful in making intentional changes in their lives, even when faced with drastic consequences.

            In his book, Change or Die, the journalist Alan Deutschman, asks: 

            What if you were given that choice, [to change or to die]? For real. What if it weren’t just the hyperbolic rhetoric that conflates corporate performance with life or death? Not the overblown exhortations of a rabid boss, or a maniacal coach, or a slick motivational speaker, or a self-dramatizing chief executive officer or political leader. We’re talking actual life and death now. Your own life and death. What if a well-informed, trusted authority figure said you had to make difficult and enduring changes in the way you think, feel, and act? If you didn’t you time would end soon - - a lot sooner than it had to. Could you change when change really mattered? When it mattered most?” 

            Deutschman says the answer is probably no. In his book, Deutschman writes about a group of people who faced exactly this choice - - a group of women and men who had undergone coronary by-pass surgery and were told if they wanted to prolong their own lives, they would have to stop smoking, stop drinking, stop overeating, start exercising, and reduce stress. Two years later, Deutschman says, 90 percent of them hadn’t changed their lifestyle.

            Besides dying, it seems like one of the worst experience you could have in life would be prison. From everything I know, life in prison is miserable. It’s degrading, it’s violent, and it’s boring. It seems like, if given a chance, most people would make any kind of a change in their lives necessary to stay out of prison, especially if they had already been to prison, but Deutschman also writes about a 2002 study by the U.S. Justice Department. This study found that one third of prison inmates were re-arrested within six months, and two-thirds within three years.

            In fact, Deutschman says, when most individuals or organizations are faced with a “do or die” situation, only 1 out of 10 are successful in making a change.

            What should this tell us about human nature, about our ability to change, about our hopes and dreams for our own lives?

            I want to suggest this is a religious topic because the liberal religious tradition in which this church stands affirms that we as human beings do have a degree of control over our lives and through our own free wills, our intellects, and our efforts, we can make changes in our own individual lives and in our world. Many nineteenth-century Unitarians spoke of “salvation by character” - - a rather staunch-sounding phrase. However, is this just another example of how the liberal religious tradition is overly-optimistic about human nature, as its critics claim? Was human nature really much more accurately described by the Apostle Paul when he said, “For I do not what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Are we rosy-eyed fools for believing otherwise?

            If you are a person who is hoping to make a change in your life in 2009, what’s the best thing to do? Would it be better to not even try to make any kind of a change? Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous Serenity Prayer says, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Does wisdom suggest that we should just settle for self-acceptance? To paraphrase the words of Billy Joel, would it be better to not to try to change anything about ourselves or our lives, and learn to love ourselves just the way we are?

            This is what I believe.

            I believe it’s always a good idea to love ourselves, but I also believe that real change is possible for our lives and for our world, but the sudden, dramatic change - - either overnight or in 30 days or less - - is rarely possible, for most of us, most of the time at least.

            Like with many things in life, I believe that nature provides us with a good example of how real change happens. The natural world sometimes does change suddenly, dramatically, even cataclysmically. As I was driving to Corvallis last weekend, the appearance of the jagged silhouette of Mt. St. Helens in the distance reminded me of how nature sometimes transforms itself. However, in our planet’s 4.5 billion year history, most of the changes in nature have been very incremental, taking place over eons.

            Sometimes I like to visit the Flaming Geyser State Park out near Black Diamond, and as I walk along the banks of the Green River, I look up at the high cliffs on either side. How many tens of thousands of years, I have wondered, did it take for that river to wear a rut through rock to form that gorge?

            This seems to be most often nature’s pace - - moving at fractions of an inch per year over eons.

            Of course, most of us don’t have that kind of time. On the other hand, I think that most of us overestimate what we can accomplish in an hour, a day, or even in a week - - and set ourselves up for failure and disappointment in the process - - but under-estimate what we can accomplish in a year, or in five years, or in 10 years, or especially in a lifetime, making small, incremental changes. Nevertheless, I think this is how real change happens, in our individual lives, in our families, and in our wider society - - with high aspirations for our lifetimes and low expectations for every day. Or in other words, with big dreams and small steps.

            I want to suggest for your consideration this morning, if you are considering making a change in your life in 2009, a good question to ask yourself is, “What’s the smallest possible change I could make in my life that will make a positive difference?”

            But why exactly start with the smallest possible change? Why do most big, dramatic attempts at change fail?

            I suspect most of us underestimate how hard making a change is, even a very small change. I know I often do. Doing anything different, doing anything new, is almost always more difficult than we think it will be.

            Change is hard because we are such creatures of habit, about very big things and very small things. I see this almost every Sunday morning. You see, I know that most of you have certain spots that you like to sit in here in this sanctuary. Every week ,you like to sit in the same part of the sanctuary, sometimes even in the same chair. It feels comfortable. You get used to it. You come to think of it as your spot, as your chair. But then, sometimes, you walk into the sanctuary, and just like in Goldilocks, there is somebody else sitting in your chair, somebody else who obviously doesn’t know that this is your chair.  I see the look on your face when you discover this, and it’s so expressive, saying, “How can I possibly be at church today if I have to sit in the fifth row instead of the fourth row?”

            Change is hard because there is almost always resistance to any kind of change we try to make - - sometimes from within us and sometimes from people around us - - even when it seems like it is change completely for the better.

            One of my ongoing efforts at a whole new me is to get up at least four mornings a week to go swimming, and recently I’ve been fairly successful in my efforts, but whenever my alarm clock goes off, there is always a voice in my head telling me, “Why don’t you just skip this morning, stay in bed, and sleep another hour?” I have a nickname for this voice in my head. I call it “Satan,” and for whatever reason Satan does not want me to get up and go swimming in the morning, though it’s good for me and makes me feel better.

            Slightly more seriously, I know that in families, when one person in a family begins to turn his or her life around in some way, other members of the family will sometimes find ways to secretly sabotage that change, even if they’ve been encouraging it.

            On the national level, anybody who thinks that a new administration is going to be able to make any significant changes in our country without a lot of resistance from the powers-that-be just because there is now a mood of goodwill in Washington, D.C. is in for an unpleasant surprise, I think.

            Especially in our personal lives, small changes are likely to be more successful because even a small change is going to take a lot of willpower - - that ability to do something right now, or not do something right now in order to have things be better in the future - - and willpower is a funny thing.

            I recently learned some bad news about willpower. Some recent studies show that we only have a limited reserve of willpower that we get to use every day. For example, if you have three difficult tasks that you have to do in any one day, and you use up all your willpower on the first, then you’re less likely to succeed on the second or, especially, the third task. This is why people who choose 10 New Year resolutions are usually less successful than people who choose just one. There are just so many difficult things we can do in a day. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but if you’ve already used up all your willpower to get up and come to church, the rest of your day is already shot.

            However, if we do choose one thing, one small thing that is a little bit challenging for us, and we use our limited amount of willpower to do that, then eventually, over time, whatever we’re doing will probably become a habit.

            How long does it take to form a new habit or break a hold habit? I’ve read that it takes at least three weeks to form a very simple new habit. I remember when I moved from an apartment in Federal Way to a house in Federal Way several years ago, it took about that long for me to stop driving back home after work to the old apartment. For the sake of the new residents, it was probably a good thing that I had given back all my keys. On the other hand, it takes the average smoker 8 to 10 efforts before he or she is able to stop smoking, and that can take years, but once somebody has gone for a year without cigarettes, 90 percent of people never go back.

            And once something does really become a habit - - and good habits are just as hard to break as bad habits - - then we can turn that limited amount of willpower that we have every day toward something else. And while the bad news about willpower is that we only have a limited reserve of it to use every day, the good news is that willpower seems to be like a muscle, and the more we use to the stronger it can become, which is another reason to start with small simple changes and build up to bigger ones.

            I read in Reader’s Digest about one woman who decided to start flossing her teeth. At first, it was a tiresome task, and it took every ounce of her willpower to do it. But within a little less than a month, it became routine. That motivated her to try to change something else. She decided it she would stop eating sweets between meals. It took about another month. Then she decided she stop criticizing her husband. That took a full month. Then she decided she would start praising her children more often. That took a little less than a month.

            Within four months, she had started flossing, stopped eating sweets between meals, stop criticizing her husband, and started praising her kids more often, but only because she had started small and taken things one step at a time.

            And small changes can add up. According to a study that examined the differences between athletes who win Olympic medals and those who don’t, the biggest difference between them is not effort or talent or drive. Rather, it is the care and consistency with which they engage in the mundane activities that prepare them for competition. In a report, interestingly titled, “The Mundanity of Excellence,” the sociologist Daniel F. Chambliss says of the winner’s success: “There is no secret; there is only the doing of all those little things, each one done correctly, time and again, until excellence in every detail becomes a firmly ingrained habit, an ordinary part of one’s everyday life.”

            I think what’s true of our individual lives is also true of our wider world. I sometimes read the newspaper or listen to the radio, and I wonder to myself, will the world ever be able to change? From day to day, from week to week, from year to year, it often seems like the world will never be any better than it is today. It’s so easy to feel discouraged and demoralized. But if we take only a slightly longer perspective, it’s really amazing at how the world has changed.

            Think about this. On August 28, 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. proclaimed his dream for the United States of America, and on January 20, 2009, in front of the U.S. Capitol, Barack Hussein Obama will take the oath of office to become the President of the United States.

            From the Lincoln Memorial across the National Mall to the steps of the U.S. Capitol, is a distance of 1.9 miles. It will have taken 45 years, four months, and 23 days for us as a nation to make the journey from one historic spot to the other. If you’re curious, that’s a speed of 7 ¼ inches per day, a seemingly glacially slow speed. However, there is a Buddhist saying that proclaims, “If you are facing in the right direction, reaching your destination is only a matter of taking many very small steps,” and this historic journey was only possible because so many people kept on taking steps, some small and some large, one after the other, year after year, for more than 45 years.

            Let me finish this morning with a quote from Christopher Reeve, who, in his lifetime was an actor, an activist, and toward the end of his life, a Unitarian Universalist. He said, “So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon seem inevitable.”

            My friends, whatever your dreams may be for 2009, for your own life, or for this world in which we live, may you soon take the first of many small steps toward the inevitability of your dreams coming true.

            So may it be. Amen.