BOOK REVIEW : MASTER OF CHANGE : How to Excel When Everything is Changing — Including You, by Brad Stulberg (2023, Harper Collins Books, 222 pages)

As everyone ages, and we all do — everyone in the same boat regardless, it is part of the natural progression to gravitate towards stability and what is more established, predictable and permanent. This tendency is in nature for many people, yet we continue to have major life’s experiences in our search for stability and permanence and as life continues. How do you tie down constant change as given in the world today (small stuff aside even) when people are seeking primarily permanence and stability? Brad Stulberg, in this survey text of different approaches to the chaos, ups and downs, even radical changes and situations in life as it continues proposes a “Rugged Flexibility” that goes along with efforts toward and a continued goal of sustainable excellence. As you might be able to tell, reading this text will give the reader some new vocabulary, new and valuable, in the way we react to and approach change for what it is, negative or positive and how it is viewed — change being a quite neutral factor, actually, in human existence. Rugged Flexibility in its different views, approaches, and integration of change into our lives enables one to really live amidst change, disorder, chaos; and turns the usual responses to change at least somewhat on their heads.

Change and disruption, again chaos, even bedlam and pandemonium according to an ages - old paradigm are not supposed to be good for the psyche nor for the human body. Stulberg reverses this thinking first by giving the reader a way to approach change with a different mindset that is adaptive, and then how to thrive on it. One or more approaches to change without the proper mindset can instill fear, loathing, dread, denial, anxiety . . . (choose your terms), though the author proposes that the existential dilemma of, e.g., confusion and fear in the presence of change, even that which accompanies suffering and its effects, invites a conversation with what is happening in the face of immutable reality, and then with adaptation true acceptance and moving forward in the circumstances.

Stulberg notably also proposes that perception of change and of reality can influence our approach to change in illustrating a “poet’s dilemma” : One strolls through nature, or one’s surroundings, even through life over time, perhaps many years; observing the greatly redeeming and beautiful character of much of our environment and the world around, yet even given this beauty there is no joy in this journey for some of us. Sigmund Freud, though not specifically on this dilemma, wrote about the transcience of things and that to the extent things are transient, and more briefly, the more valuable they are — the author thus gives the reader a choice to continue one’s journey in the flow of life, in all its ephemeral qualities and transitoriness and in the details of the durability of this approach to change is the hardness and difficulty, or chore of maintaining one’s happiness and adaptation to change. The text proposes so much can be integrated given a proper mindset — a predictive character, expectations, anticipatory factors, actual feelings of good and bad, and so on — that indeed this Rugged Flexibility is a constant work in process that begins with setting appropriate goals and with perception and other considerations that adapt to, deal with, if not then confront pain and suffering, guilt, sadness, boredom, and apathy; and along with our ability to look ahead. The text deals also with the inevitability of change and constant change and our neuroscientific responses to this — that suffering, pain and joy, anguish and hope, endings and beginnings, fear, anxiety, depression, dread, despair . . . — all of these are part of change and of human existence that along with the fitness of the psyche invites a wider range of meaning, human emotions, individual and other significance, in a very hopeful and orderly, flowing and enduring way, and again in a real conversation with change itself, no matter its radical features. The book allows for the reader to take heart in an advantageous and freer mindset in one’s relationship with change through method and process and encourages, provides in its elements, and despite the vicissitudes and difficulties, challenges of things, a stronger and more resourceful, flexible and rugged mindset to the advantages of one who meets these challenges and difficulties in a hopeful way.