The J Curve
Tumbles, spills and dips are infamous companions amidst transitions and new beginnings.
Before my family’s recent move, I had acquired a gravel trail bike and established a budding confidence as a off-road rider. When we arrived at our home after the trek to Tennessee, four sedentary days of driving and snacking had taken a toll. I skimmed riding trails assessing for a match and ambitiously selected one tagged for mountain biking. I pictured a modest dirt-path curling along the lush, green forest lining a nearby river or one of the smaller tributaries. The gentle landscape would be a reprieve from the hard, red clay and stone of Northern California’s foothills, I thought.
The first quarter mile was a dream—beautiful trees, a gentle breeze, the hum of my pedals and gears as I rode. It was perfect.
Then everything changed.
There was a rock garden that seemed to transform my seat post into a springless pogo stick. There were jolting and unending confrontations with tree stumps and exposed limestone reverberating through my wrists, elbows and shoulders. There were multiple sheer drops I judged to be more cliff-side than down-runs. It was a dream come true for those iconic long horn sheep at the beginning of Marty Stauffer’s Wild America films. For me it was the longest short ride of my life: brief in distance, enduring in physical anguish.
The pinnacle moment came as I approached the top of a dip in the trail that looked inspired by a marquee drop in a theme park roller coaster. I would nonetheless, and with what I feel was remarkable inadequacy, attempt to make up for skill with sheer bravery. I dipped down the embankment and accidentally squeezed only one of the brakes reactively. The front tire ceased its spin and the back lurched overhead deposing me over the handlebars. Mud was now slathered across my shoulders, neck and back. I peeked my head up to see if anyone had witnessed the ordeal like the wildlife in Bambi peering into the meadow hoping to avoid the hunter’s aim. The coast was clear. I walked the rest of the way down the hill, pedaled what was left of my dignity back to the car and drove home unharmed. “Mountain Biking” has since taken on a kind of Voldemort-like unutterable status. It is the ride that shall not be named.
It’s a physical portrayal of a different dip many of us have faced before called a J curve. A J curve explains why things get harder when we go through change, even though we are on the right path. The J curve teaches us to expect a drop-off in our sense of stability as we transition to a new normal. It’s easier to observe on a large scale. A society, for example, like North Korea is stable, because it is tightly controlled and closed off to change and freedom. A society like, say, Japan is stable because it is opened up. The openness has produced a healthy culture that can sustain and ultimately helps produce great freedom.
The J curve (pictured above) comes from graphing the connection between our sense of stability during change and our openness to that change along the journey. It looks exactly like the actual letter “J” from which it gets its’ name. The vertical axis from bottom to top represents stability from low to high. The horizontal axis from left to right represents the openness to change from little to great. The J curve shows our experience of stability as we progress from closed off to open to change. Going back to our large-scale example, if North Korea moves from closed (the far left of the orange line) to open (the right side of the orange line), there is a felt dip in stability as the environment transitions. It goes from stable due to tight control to stability due to cultural health.
This same principle applies to people. When we find areas of weakness or brokenness, moving toward a healthy internal culture includes letting go of the artificial stability on the left of the curve. Controlling things or people, overperforming in our lives to ensure the “right” results or consistently keeping low expectations to avoid disappointed all produce superficial stability. If we move instead toward health, we are likely to first experience the dip in our perception of our own well-bring: things become less stable, perhaps even more frightening, and seem to tell us we are on the wrong path altogether. The gift of the J curve suggests instead that the dip is actually the first fruit of genuine transformation.
In the beginning the dip appears as though movement toward health is actually making things worse. This negative feedback causes us to downgrade our dreams or sometimes quit altogether. How many times have we been tossed over the handlebars of life by pumping the brakes too hard or too quickly? How often might we sabotage our own health by misinterpreting the dip at the beginning of transformation?
What if instead we were trained to celebrate this dip as a critical dimension of growth? What if instead we had support to encourage us to endure the down-turn and rise up the other side? What if a simple spill in a small muddy crater was all that separated you from the health you are driving at? What if you too will walk away unharmed?
The insight of a J curve reframes the dip inherent in transformation dramatically. What so frequently seems to us as negative, may in fact be the uncomfortable but short-lived beginning of truly lasting change.
