Change is hard. Evolution is Easy. Episode 1 of many.

ARIEL: Full fathom five thy father lies.
Of his bones are coral made.
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
—The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2

I do apologize for this dull cliche, but I know I'm right about this: change is hard. I don't mean that it's hard to adapt after someone or something forces a change on you. That's true too, but it's not my topic here. I'm talking about this: you want to change, or you need to change, or both. You know what the change has to be. Maybe you know what the first step has to be. It's change, and it's hard.

Call it personal growth or self-improvement, or maybe it's habit-breaking or demon-wrestling. Whole libraries could be stocked with materials on how to change. Even when we know we're loved, and believe we're okay, we can see opportunities and challenges that require us to change.

I won't claim to have deep knowledge of the technical literature on how people manage to change. But I do have several decades of experience in the practice of personal growth and change. I have repeatedly faced my need to change, and one of the first lessons I had to learn was the fact that effecting change is a lot harder than it sounds. It's not that easy to face one's need to change but it's vastly more difficult to make it happen. Change is hard.

But evolution is easy.

Here's what I mean. Evolution (the word means, at its root, "unrolling") is by definition a gradual process. Biologically speaking, even "rapid evolution" means a gradual stepwise process. Whether we are talking about the evolution of language, or the evolution of societies, or the evolution of one person's thought, or the evolution of animal body plans, we are talking about a process that unfolds gradually. We're talking about a process whose individual steps are likely invisible to any observer, and often discernible only in retrospect. In many cases, we're talking about a process that had no defined goal and could have ended in numerous different ways. Whatever else we might say about evolution, we ought to think of it as something that is easier than change. One obvious difference is the pace (gradual, even literally glacial) and another is the smallness of the individual steps. Change still happens, and the magnitude of the change can be extraordinary, but it feels so different. In fact, we might not feel it at all.

Evolution is easy, but it seems to me that we rarely talk about it that way. We have blind watchmakers and we climb "Mount Improbable." We envision vast and complex landscapes over which the main character (us, or a population, or a molecule, or evolution itself) must randomly "walk" in hopes of discovering a hill of treasure while avoiding or traversing valleys of death. With the help of some busy propaganda mills, we picture our world as a hellscape of lifelessness in which we and our fellow species represent impossible islands of fragile life. It seems to me that we often picture evolution as not merely hard but as effectively impossible.

Now look, I know that I'm projecting a lot onto you the reader and onto "us" as human thinkers. Maybe you have always thought that evolution was easy. I doubt it. But I'm willing to be a bit presumptuous about what "we" think and feel about evolution because I want to push all of us to think and feel differently about it. I want us to change, or at least to look at the reasons why we think evolution is so hard.

I think it's a lot easier than you think.