percentage even when it is no more than an extremely crude estimate, and toting up the figures to make sure they never exceed 100 percent, he will be rewarded with some surprising insights. For the way he distributes his time and emotional energies is a direct clue to his value system and his personality.
The payoff for engaging in this process really begins, however, when he projects forward, asking himself honestly and in detail how his job, or his marriage, or his relationship with his children or his parents is likely to develop within the years ahead.
If, for example, he is a forty-year-old middle manager with two teen-age sons, two surviving parents or in-laws, and an incipient duodenal ulcer, he can assume that within half a decade his boys will be off to college or living away on their own. Time devoted to parental concerns will probably decline. Similarly, he can anticipate some decline in the emotional energies demanded by his parental role. On the other hand, as his own parents and in-laws grow older, his filial responsibility will probably loom larger. If they are sick, he may have to devote large amounts of time and emotion to their care. If they are statistically likely to die within the period under study, he needs to face this fact. It tells him that he can expect a major change in his commitments. His own health, in the meantime, will not be getting any better. In the same way, he can hazard some guesses about his job – his chances for promotion, the possibility of reorganization, relocation, retraining, etc.
All this is difficult, and it does not yield 'knowledge of the future.' Rather, it helps him make explicit some of his assumptions about the future. As he moves forward, filling in the forecast for the present year, the next year, the fifth or tenth year, patterns of change will begin to emerge. He will see that in certain years there are bigger shifts and redistributions to be expected than in others. Some years are choppier, more change-filled than others. And he can then, on the strength of these systematic assumptions, decide how to handle major decisions in the present.
Should the family move next year – or will there be enough turmoil and change without that? Should he quit his job? Buy a new car? Take a costly vacation? Put his elderly father-inlaw in a nursing home? Have an affair? Can he afford to rock his marriage or change his profession? Should he attempt to maintain certain levels of commitment unchanged?
These techniques are extremely crude tools for personal planning. Perhaps the psychologists and social psychologists can design sharper instruments, more sensitive to differences in probability, more refined and insight-yielding. Yet, if we search for clues rather than certainties, even these primitive devices can help us moderate or channel the flow of change in our lives. For, by helping us identify the zones of rapid change, they also help us identify – or invent – stability zones, patterns of relative constancy in the overwhelming flux. They improve the odds in the personal struggle to manage change.
Nor is this a purely negative process – a struggle to suppress or limit change. The issue for any individual attempting to cope with rapid change is how to maintain himself within the adaptive range, and, beyond that, how to find the exquisite optimum point at which he lives at peak effectiveness. Dr. John L. Fuller, a senior scientist at the Jackson Laboratory, a biomedical research center in Bar Harbor, Maine, has conducted experiments in the impact of experiential deprivation and overload. 'Some people,' he says, 'achieve a certain sense of serenity, even in the midst of turmoil, not because they are immune to emotion, but because they have found ways to get just the 'right' amount of change in their lives.' The search for that optimum may be what much of the 'pursuit of happiness' is about.
Trapped, temporarily, with the limited nervous and endocrine systems given us by evolution, we must work out new tactics to help us regulate the stimulation to which we subject ourselves.
The trouble is that such personal tactics become less effective with every passing day. As the rate of change climbs, it becomes harder for individuals to create the personal stability zones they need. The costs of non- change escalate.
We may stay in the old house – only to see the neighborhood transformed. We may keep the old car – only to see repair bills mount beyond reach. We may refuse to transfer to a new location – only to lose our job as a result. For while there are steps we can take to reduce the impact of change in our personal lives, the real problem lies outside ourselves.
To create an environment in which change enlivens and enriches the individual, but does not overwhelm him, we must employ not merely personal tactics but social strategies. If we are to carry people through the accelerative period, we must begin now to build 'future shock absorbers' into the very fabric of super-industrial society. And this requires a fresh way of thinking about change and non-change in our lives. It even requires a different way of classifying people.
Today we tend to categorize individuals not according to the changes they happen to be undergoing at the moment, but according to their status or position between changes. We consider a union man as someone who has joined a union and not yet quit. Our designation refers not to joining or quitting, but to the 'non-change' that happens in between. Welfare recipient, college student, Methodist, executive – all refer to the person's condition between changes, as it were.
There is, however, a radically different way to view people. For example, 'one who is moving to a new residence' is a classification into which more than 100,000 Americans fit on any given day, yet they are seldom thought of as a group. The classification 'one who is changing his job' or 'one who is joining a church,' or 'one who is getting a divorce' are all based on temporary, transitional conditions, rather than on the more enduring conditions between transitions.
This sudden shift of focus, from thinking about what people 'are' to thinking about what they are 'becoming,' suggests a whole array of new approaches to adaptation.
One of the most imaginative and simplest of these comes from Dr. Herbert Gerjuoy, a psychologist on the staff of the Human Resources Research Organization. He terms it 'situational grouping,' and like most good ideas, it sounds obvious once it is described. Yet it has never been systematically exploited. Situational grouping may well become one of the key social services of the future.
Dr. Gerjuoy argues that we should provide temporary organizations – 'situational groups' – for people who happen to be passing through similar life transitions at the same time. Such situational groups should be established, Gerjuoy contends, 'for families caught in the upheaval of relocation, for men and women about to be divorced, for people about to lose a parent or a spouse, for those about to gain a child, for men preparing to switch to a new occupation, for families that have just moved into a community, for those about to marry off their last child, for those facing imminent retirement – for anyone, in other words, who faces an important life change.
'Membership in the group would, of course, be temporary – just long enough to help the person with the transitional difficulties. Some groups might meet for a few months, others might not do more than hold a single meeting.'
By bringing together people who are sharing, or are about to share, a common adaptive experience, he argues, we help equip them to cope with it. 'A man required to adapt to a new life situation loses some of his bases for self-esteem. He begins to doubt his own abilities. If we bring him together with others who are moving through the same experience, people he can identify with and respect, we strengthen him. The members of the group come to share, even if briefly, some sense of identity. They see their problems more objectively. They trade useful ideas and insights. Most important, they suggest future alternatives for one another.'
This emphasis on the future, says Gerjuoy, is critical. Unlike some group therapy sessions, the meetings of situational groups should not be devoted to hashing over the past, or to griping about it, or to soul-searching self-revelation, but to discussing personal objectives, and to planning practical strategies for future use in the new life situation. Members might watch movies of other similar groups wrestling with the same kinds of problems. They might hear from others who are more advanced in the transition than they are. In short, they are given the opportunity to pool their personal experiences and ideas before the moment of change is upon them.
In essence, there is nothing novel about this approach. Even now certain organizations are based on situational principles. A group of Peace Corps volunteers preparing for an overseas mission is, in effect, just such a situational grouping, as are pre– and post-natal classes. Many American towns have a 'Newcomer's Club' that invites new residents to casserole dinners or other socials, permitting them to mix with other recent arrivals and compare problems and plans. Perhaps there ought to be an 'Outmovers Club' as well. What is new is the suggestion that we systematically honeycomb the society with such 'coping classrooms.'
Not all help for the individual can, or necessarily should come from groups. In many cases, what the
