Those conflicting inner voices

Everywhere I look right now there are people wrestling with change, and it's clear the competing voices of their struggles have a way of echoing in the studio as I paint.  There's the Moses -- the J on the Myers-Briggs scale -- who is ready to lead us out of whatever desert we're in, and the Hamlet, clearly a P on that scale, who can see what needs to be done and yet repeatedly backs away from action in hopes of gathering more information, more clarity.  Moses becomes a sort of chiaroscuro, lots of black and white and strong contrasts, while Hamlet has a way of muddying everything.  And somehow we need both to achieve a balanced composition.

My reading in Mark Nepo's Seven Thousand Ways to Listen this morning seems to clearly speak to that tension."We need to acknowledge that we have an impulse of soul that will follow what is true and a change-resistant voice that will adhere to what is familiar... Admitting that we obey these voices and openly allowing the two to dialogue within us is an important practice of being in the world... This isn't easy but necessary.  How do we relate to our change-resistant voice, which says "yes, but" to everything?  Much has to do with choosing to enter life rather than retreat from it... 

We can respond to life in three ways: creatively, leaning into emerging situations that connect us to the life around us; neurotically by retreating into isolations that protect us from the unpredictable; or, more dangerously, by reframing our retreating behaviors as necessary stances in a harsh world..."

It's that last one that worries me the most.  The curse of intelligence is its ability to rationalize and justify almost any behavior.  As Nepo says, we can reframe mistrust as maturity, guilt as self-effacing sacrifice; insecurity as humility, indecision as adaptability, stagnation as stillness, isolation as independence, and despair as a stoic acceptance of reality.  It's amazingly easy to get off track, and the fear of change has a gift for keeping us there...