The Two Belong Together
Why stability, efficiency, and even freedom need their opposites
In my early thirties, after years of exceptional performance as an A+ southern Christian lady, I ran out of fitting-in energy. Where I live in South Carolina, in certain churches and neighborhoods, there’s a pretty thin zone of acceptance. I had spent a lifetime staying between the lines; and then one day, I was done.
From the outside, there was no major change. I mean, I did stop wearing contacts and allowed myself to wear the funky glasses I’d always preferred. At 39, I even got a tattoo. I’m not saying I’m necessarily the most revolutionary woman on the planet, but yeah, I’m pretty brave.
Aside from the glasses, though, I still “passed” for acceptable inside my little zone: White. Mother. Wife. House on a “good” street. Husband with a “good” professional job. All those characteristics that were “right” about me, though, made it harder for me to tell the truth to people. I was already deeply embedded in a zone of suitability, and, by default, people expected me to think and behave a certain way. I don’t mean that they generally wanted me not to be an ax murderer or Satanist, not to dance naked on the front lawn or snort cocaine in my well-appointed bathroom. What I mean is that people could be (and were) genuinely horrified and saddened by differing opinions (or votes) on even small political or theological issues. So I lived in fear of saying the wrong thing.1
I tell you all this just to get to this point: I was feeling squirrelly (because of my own insides), so I decided I wanted to move.
I don’t just mean I wanted to move to a new house or city. I mean, I wanted to get as far away from South Carolina as I could.
After attending grad school in Seattle, I knew people there who made me feel at home. Seattle or Portland—or Anywhere Else—became the promised land of my imagination. I tried to build a case for moving our lives to the west coast.
There were a few problems with this. We built my husband’s office building and practice from scratch. We renovated and owned our house. Our families were on the east coast. We had four kids, two cars, beloved friends, a stack of casserole dishes we’d received as wedding gifts, pretty hydrangea bushes in the yard... all the things that keep you in a place. We were just about the least mobile people I can imagine. My husband was willing to move, but I knew requiring that of my family was asking too much of them.
So, we stayed.
We have lived in the same city since 2008.
I read a book almost 15 years ago called The Wisdom of Stability. I don’t remember much, but I do remember the author wrote that stability is a “virtue.” I’m not sure that’s right.
I think about stability the way I think about efficiency, which I wrote a little Note about here. Both are actually virtue-neutral concepts, which is to say their value (or lack thereof) depends on context. It would be silly to claim a Christmas morning spent unwrapping presents and eating homemade cinnamon rolls ought to be “efficient,” in the same way it would be silly to claim an after-school car pick-up line shouldn’t be. The context is everything.
People who cling to stability are often the very people who need to be disrupted.
And people who thrive in disruption often really need to be trained by the advantages of stability.
A person who has decided stability is king has made all his choices simple. He stays put, maybe even when a move would do him (or those around him) good. He doesn’t change his mind when new ideas (or even facts) come along. He stays where he feels in control, choosing stability at the cost of personal growth and change.
On the other hand, a person (like me) who over-values growth often fails to see the worth in durable, reliable things. She is always trying to start new, and she risks never making anything meaningful.
Eight or ten years ago, I craved movement. I wanted to pack up and flee my discomfort.
It wasn’t a bad instinct, but good things happened when I stayed put. I’ve been able to build things, personally and professionally. Living in this city has forced me, every year, to get a little more okay with being who I am.
Although I’m sure the disruption of a cross-country move would have had plenty to teach me, I had to learn the lessons of stability instead. Not better lessons, not worse lessons. Different lessons.
Another time, in my twenties, I needed a shake-up. During those years, the wisdom was not in stability; it came from the very opposite direction.
We have a dangerous tendency to take concepts that have potential for value and turn them into THE value. A government that is efficient at all costs. A life that is novel (or, conversely, stable) at all costs.
When we collapse tension, codifying value-neutral concepts into Pure Values, we fail to acknowledge trade-offs.
We often don’t even realize the choices underneath our choices, like some original, probably subconscious decision to build a life around change. We don’t realize we may have clung to one of these value-neutral concepts to keep ourselves safe. We’re advocating for this “good thing,” failing to see that it isn’t always what’s needed.
Consider for a moment the science of stability.
Solids are solids because the atoms are bonded; when a force of separation comes, they put up resistance.
Liquids, on the other hand, undergo continuous change in shape when subjected to stress.
Solids are not “better than” liquids. Liquids are not “better than” solids. Sometimes you want a mattress to sleep on; sometimes you want water to swim in.
Sometimes my kids need a solid, firm mother; sometimes they need a fluid, adaptable one.
I’ve been reading a book called Liquid Modernity, written in 2000. The author, Zygmunt Bauman, uses states of matter as a metaphor for modernity, arguing we have moved out of a society that was primarily solid and into one that is primarily liquid. Society, in other words, is melting.
Solidity is stability; liquidity is inconstant. Which is better?
I hunted down the book because the central metaphor was so resonant for me. Things do feel more “liquid” these days: meetings over Zoom seem not to have an actual location in space, institutions and rules seem fluid in a new way, our whole society seems subject to personal whims. And yes, people are transient (regarding both cities and relationships) in an entirely new way.
This happened, argues Bauman, because we collectively acknowledged the importance of freedom. This is good! Freedom is good. So to get free, we “melted the fetters and manacles suspected of limiting our freedom.”
But we also melted communities, traditions, and institutions. Once our (too) solid society was gone, we were left with a society “absent of patterns, codes, and rules.”
It is difficult to live inside this kind of all-liquid society. As Bauman writes, “Keeping fluids in shape requires a lot of attention, constant vigilance, and perpetual insight.” Because we moderns are fluid, and our ideas are fluid, and now our entire sense of democracy is fluid, we are quite tired. Our collective exhaustion stems in part, I think, from our liquidity. We are always treading water, no solid mattress to hold us for sleep when we need it.2
We elevated personal freedom from an obvious Potential Value to a Pure Value, the kind of value that can never be argued with or pushed back on.
But even freedom is subject to tension. Liquids need solids.
And yet. Yet! On a cultural level, the old solids were not just for most people. It is wrong to insist on institutions or traditions merely for the sake of those institutions or traditions.
What is called for culturally, in this moment of almost pure liquidity, is the same thing that is called for personally: an ability to tolerate holding tension. What’s true on an individual level applies on a societal level as well: these concepts need one another for wholeness. Right now the larger American conversation sets up an opposition between either burning down the institutions or protecting them at all costs. (This has now become a left vs. right issue, surprise!) Neither makes sense.
The answer is to strategically eliminate what isn’t working about our institutions and then to make replacements and improvements.
We don’t talk about building better things because that kind of project doesn’t set up a clear argument between one side and another.
Holding tension is not good for the YouTube algorithm. Or a two-party voting system. It’s also just hard for the human brain. Holding tension makes us squirrelly, and we want to flee toward simplicity.
Pure Values are so much cozier than the complexity of reality.
We Americans are in the business of division, but wisdom is in reuniting parts of a whole. Stability needs adventure; efficiency needs whimsy; freedom needs boundaries. The chickens need the fence.
As
recently wrote, “The idea of ‘sacrifice’ in a secular context is decoupled from what should follow: Renewal. We have new-age self-help stuff that is all about change and renewal and new life, and nothing about sacrifice... The two belong together. Sacrifice. And renewal.”Liquid. And Solids.
Stability. And Change.
Efficiency. And slow presence that defies all the math.
Fun news: Between Two Things is getting a new look later this week! Next time you show up here, don’t worry... you’re not in the wrong place. Everything just got cuter. ✨
About a decade has passed, and I would like to say that I have come to see that most of this was in my head. Some of it was, I’m sure. I’ve occasionally been surprised by people who live in the zone but think outside it. But mostly I was right to be nervous: I’ve many times been on the receiving end of people’s shock or sadness as they discover I am not who they thought I was. (For what it’s worth, I do understand why they have a need for me to think just like them, and I do sympathize with their reactions.)
This is, I think, how the bad ideas of the Andrew Tates of the world take hold, inside the vacuum left by now-absent institutions.
As a serial mover, who was always trying to find "the place," I can understand addiction to change. Over the years I've realized that there is no perfect place and that belonging comes when and where I create it (I do find some places easier for me to create belonging in than others). At this point in my life, I'd be alright with physically settling down. However, I've just made yet another move, which probably won't be my last. But your piece reminds me that even in constant geographical flux, I can find stability, in myself, in my family, in my gardens planted everywhere I go. Thank you.
Thank you for this thoughtful essay. I grew up constantly on the move. First in a military family and later moving at the whim of my husband's corporate job. When I finally had a chance to stay (though not in a place of my choosing), I began to feel irritable and hyper critical of everything and everyone. When things get uncomfortable, it is easier to leave than to stay. I appreciated hearing the other side, from someone who stayed. For that perspective, I'm also looking forward to reading Annie B. Jones' new book of essays, Ordinary Time. I love your analogy of solid and liquid. As a too, liquid being, I wish I could stop looking for the perfect container.