So.

I was at the Playground yesterday — the center where I teach this stuff — doing what I often do:

Moving things around.

Figuratively too, but mostly literally.

Pushing one table this way. Moving another to the Galley (because the Playground is also a pirate ship, that’s how magical it is).

Putting the fairy door someplace unexpected and then hiding the “get the hell out of my bar!” troll in a pile of costumes.

I do this to create pleasure. But also to shake things up.

It’s fun when someone comes to a Rally (Rally!) or another event after they’ve already been to the Playground.

Everything is familiar, and at the same time it’s all delightfully different.

They run from room to room, exclaiming over the new: A hammock in the Refueling Station! New bulletin boards! A giant stuffed bunny named Shfanfanon!

It’s also kind of disorienting. Because different always trips us up.

Obviously, different-fun and different-exciting are way better than different-crappy. But it’s hard to encounter the New and Unknown without some leftover scary and loss.

Change is a given. And it’s often also incredibly uncomfortable.

There’s really only one thing more important than change

And that’s the ability to adapt to it. Adaptation! This is the heart of destuckification.

Flexibility. Compassionate detachment. Letting things be the way they are right now. Letting people be where they are, even when that’s incredibly frustrating.

The approach that is curious and playful, not prescriptive and not reactive.

Adaptation is also one of those examples of how destuckification is vital to business, marketing and biggification in all forms.

Because the best business skill there is (and a big chunk of my weird, magical accidental-savant powers), is this:

The ability to perceive that a situation has changed and to immediately say, “Oh, okay, things are different now. Got it! We’ll try moving this way then.”

And the piece about acknowledgment.

My dear friend Janet Bailey (you might know her from Mindful Time Management) says many wise things about change.

And one of them is about the power of acknowledging loss.

Even when a round of change is completely for the good, and you’re relieved to be in the new whatever-it-is, there’s nearly always an accompanying experience of loss.

The path not taken, the possibility not chosen, the you-who-could-have-been…or maybe it’s just about how it’s all new.

But there is loss. And part of being good at transitions and adaptation involves being able to make room for multiple emotions and experiences:

I am allowed to have mixed emotions. It’s okay if a part of me feels sad or confused.

Feeling conflicted doesn’t mean I don’t want this or that I don’t care.

Adaptation as intentional practice.

So obviously life is already full of enough tumultuous ridiculousness that it’s not like we have to deliberately arrange new things to trip on.

But sometimes I will still intentionally mix things up more than necessary, just to jumpstart that process of adapting.

Going into the third year of my Kitchen Table program, I actively looked for a combination (small and large) of things to change.

We started 2010 off focusing on communication and sovereignty, because the previous year had made it clear that this was exactly where the most work was needed.

This year we’re starting with adaptation, because that’s where the weak spot is.

Choosing change then becomes a practice, in order to better hone those skills of adaptation.

Just like in Shiva Nata, when we make the patterns more complicated before they become automatic. Or in yoga when we work with our strengths while simultaneously developing the parts that are not as strong yet.

We work on what we need to learn.

And while it’s a healthy practice, sometimes it sucks to be in it.

So we create safe rooms and we dance our patterns and we talk to our monsters.

We give legitimacy to the part of us who doesn’t want anything to change and the part who wishes everything would change faster already.

And then we move some more things around.