An old friend from France asked the other day what the current state of the world is like for me. My response came surprisingly spontaneously: I told him that what I’m doing feels far from enough given the scale of what we’re facing. And, I’m doing work in which I feel useful, and which is growing me towards the sort of person I believe is needed to better handle our collective predicament.
I’ve always had a knack for spotting what might need to change in a system. But it’s taken me lots of change ‘experiments’ with varying levels of success to more deeply understand the wisdom behind those famous words often attributed to Mohandas Gandhi: be the change you want to see. Embodying that wisdom is, of course, a work-in-progress.
What I’m currently practising is to pause, and to check in with my intentions, each time I feel an urge to respond to a spark of anger triggered by what I see as ‘wrong’. To be brutally honest with myself and discern whether the urge is coming more from a place of righteousness, or more from a place of fierce compassion. And, if it is grounded in fierce compassion, to then engage in a tiny act of pushing a superficial boundary, or peacefully refusing to comply.
This might look as tiny as stubbornly writing my clinical notes in hospital using the patient’s first name instead of the efficient, dehumanising ‘Pt’. In choosing, after taking a long, deep breath, to ask as open and gently curious a question as I can manage in that moment to try to understand what someone has just said. Or in answering brontë velez’s magnificent question (which I discovered through Sarah Wilson’s equally stunning I eat the stars): how will I be useless to capitalism today?
In what tiny ways are you becoming the change you want to see?