Feel the power!

According to some scholars, the Roman deity Janus is the god of beginnings and the association with doorways and arches is merely derivative. I prefer to think of Janus as representing transition. Just as a doorway marks the point at which you change from being in one place to being in another, so the two (sometimes four) faces of Janus stand as a metaphor for the point at which the past becomes the fleeting present before becoming the future. Janus is always now. Now is always where we are. Perpetually at the moment when the inputs of the past are processed and the future created.

Janus might also be considered the god of opportunity. The everlasting second-chance of now. The instant at which it is determined whether hopes and plans become triumph or disappointment, achievement or failure.

It’s easy to see why Janus takes on a special significance as the transition from one year to the next approaches. We are constantly looking back as well as forward. Forever trying to make sense of the past so as to understand its implications for the future. But there are occasions when we are particularly aware of this incessant process. Times of actual or symbolic change – such as the seasons of the year and the milestones of birthdays or the birth of a child or even just starting a new job.. Times when we become acutely conscious of the potential to shape the future. To carve it with our choices.

It seems that this potential to shape the future is all too seldom realised. Surely, if each of us was realising our potential to even some extent, we would see an improving world wrought by the aggregate of this effort. I look back at 2023 and before and I see no evidence of this improvement. I look forward to 2024 and beyond and I see little prospect of it. Given the salutary lessons of history, one would suppose different choices would be made. Touch a flame, Get burned. Avoid touching flames. The logic seems obvious. What we see, however, is humanity leaping repeatedly and with undiminished enthusiasm into the same fire. It’s not what anyone would choose. Yet it is the product of all our choices. Including, of course, the choice to do nothing.

Power that is not exercised is not power without effect. The effectiveness of the unexercised power passes to those who chose to exercise such power as they have. You cannot be an innocent bystander. You cannot opt out of politics - the management of power. The choice to do nothing is a political choice. Doing nothing is a political act. Nothing is as it was always meant to be. Everything is as the exercise of power has made it to be, or as the failure to exercise power has allowed it to become. The first act of established power is to make others feel powerless. If you are convinced that you are powerless to effect change, you are less likely to make the effort. The less you make the effort, the greater the disparity in power becomes and the more powerless you feel.

Nothing makes you powerless so much as feeling powerless. Convinced of your powerlessness, you make no more than a token effort to influence the transition between past and future, thus further empowering those who recognise and exercise whatever power they have. The evidence would suggest that it is predominantly those who make bad choices who are actually making the choices while those who might make better choices are bemoaning their powerlessness.

What this would appear to add up to is a relentless downward spiral. An unstoppable descent into chaos as the power to make and implement choices increasingly accrues to those who make bad choices and are rewarded with more power to make and implement more bad choices. Meanwhile, potential countervailing power becomes ever more convinced of its powerlessness and hence ever more powerless.

Is the situation hopeless? Probably! But not necessarily. If there was a way for the people who might make better choices to feel less powerless then they would, almost by definition, become more powerful. If there was a way for them to become more powerful and not lose sight of the better choices they might make, then also almost by definition, better choices would eventually prevail. The problem is that people tend to see the enormity of the world created by bad choices and assume that it all needs to change. Effecting change at this level demands a huge amount of power. Power on a scale unimaginable for those convinced of their own powerlessness. The sheer scale of the mess is daunting in the extreme. It is not so surprising that people shrug their shoulders and turn away in despair.

There is almost no line at all between being convinced that you are powerless to affect the big things and being persuaded that you are powerless to affect anything. Even the things in your own life that you know you should change. Every time the individual goes through one of those symbolic transitions only to emerge unimproved, the feeling of powerlessness is reinforced. It stands to reason, therefore, that if the individual could effect any kind of positive change at all at such times, this must be empowering. The feeling of powerlessness being reduced – even if only be a very small amount – is empowerment. Being empowered makes it possible to envisage effecting further change.

If you are not convinced of your powerlessness, then you have all the power you need. So, do something to demonstrate that you are not powerless. It doesn’t matter what it is. Whatever it is, it cannot be insignificant. It is the fact of exercising power to effect intended change that is important. The actual change effected hardly matters – so long as it is change for the better.

This is the point where I refer yet again to the fact that I shed one third of my body weight in the course of one year. In December 2019 I was horribly obese. It is no exaggeration to say that the excess weight was crippling me. It was also killing me. But it was the effect it was having on my day-to-day life that really bothered me. I was less and less able to do the sort of things that I should have been able to take for granted. I made a ‘New Year Resolution’ to change this. I went into the symbolic transition point of the end of one year and beginning of a new year intent on bringing my weight down to a liveable level.

In the course of 2020 – what we probably all think of as ‘Lockdown Year’ – I managed my weight down from 150kg to 100kg. Needless to say, this was transformative in terms of my physical health. But at least as important was the psychological impact of having successfully used my power to effect positive change. I had not changed the world. But I had changed myself. And that’s a start.

I am not wishing anybody a happy new year. I am urging them to make this symbolic transition the moment when they cease to feel totally powerless by doing something. It can be something as trivial as tidying that hell-hole cupboard that has haunted you for more years than you can remember. Or it can be something as major as transforming your body. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you do it. That you go into the transition with an intention that can only be realised by exercising your own power, and that you make it happen. So, be sure to choose something that is doable.

Remember! You are not actually powerless, no matter how thoroughly you have been persuaded of your powerlessness. That power is latent. It needs only your decision to make it functional. Do that small thing over the next few months and I guarantee you will find in yourself the power to do ever bigger things.