Recalcitrance 2.0

So I've been taking a class this semester and have come upon a theory that I welcome. Rarely do I study theory and welcome it, I usally have a hard time understanding how to put theory into practice (the real world). But, this time it kinda came the other way, I'd been experiencing something and could not really put it into words. I couldn't adequatley describe what I'd been going through, but now I have this theory that does a good job explaining what I'm going through.

Recalcitrance is something that Burke coined in his work Permanence and Change. It basically boils down to the idea that you can't just say anything and have it be true, the wolrd will and can force you to redefine your statements. For example, I could say, "I'll run out in front of traffic and be just fine." Well, if I did that I'd get hurt, duh, and so the physical world would have then forced me to redefine my statement to make it more true, "If I run out into traffic I'll get hurt."

My physical world has been challenged since my grandma passed, last June 20. Challenged, because so much of what I thought and believed was shaken and things I never imagined happened. My grandma's death changed the way my family functioned, at one time you could always find us together on a Friday night at my granny's house, but now its not like that anymore. And we are all trying to redefine our selves and our beliefs, our statments as we are met with this new kind of reality. I think that for me, so many times I was still trying to operate in the old way, like the old me, but that old me was being met with fierce opposition in this new reality. Trying to force things that just were not working really made me hurt. I'd had a lot of people tell me, in a lot of different ways that I needed to welcome the new me here and allow her to flourish. The new me was not made up of only my grandma's death, but the Babe's birth also. Within six weeks I was to be reshaped by two very cataclysimc events and I have had a very hard time allowing that new person to operate. Sometimes I let myself get so washed away in the way things were that I don't realize that there is a new version of myself, and she's not at all bad.

I guess just as with anything, there are always kinks that need to be worked out in new versions.