Is it more of the same? Predictable, safe, and reliable?
Or is it uncertain? Full of possibility?
Most organized people have a plan. The opposite, however, isn’t unorganized. It’s to go without a plan. These travelers are not so rigid to stick to something that was decided in the past. They don’t think the world owes them for preparation.
Plans are overrated and are worthless when we are doing something great, daring, and unknown. Just do the next step that appears. Repeat.
Anyone can pretend to be a climate activist. Just hit repost and send a signal to your followers what you stand for. Or eat vegetarian or drive a Prius.
Much harder to be a climate activist. You have to be stubborn in this culture. Pursuing a goal each and every day. Most importantly ignoring what many of us were taught at such a young age at school–to be compliant.
Bending the culture towards a more just world, you can’t be half in doing something like that. It’s serious work.
And it the same when we are talking about artists too.
It’s a lot like watching your favorite sports team win or lose. If you won, you want to boast about it, and if you lost then well time to lick your wounds.
And now what?
We wait for the next urgent thing to pop up on our Facebook feed. This isn’t news, it’s entertainment. (Dogecoin proved that.)
Meanwhile, nothing changed. Because posting your thoughts in the moment isn’t going to change the status quo. Action does. Clicking send is not going get people to pause and think. Only further fuel the cycle of sports fandom.
We send the virtue post to let people know what side we are on. I’m afraid we also tell ourselves a story that we are helping when we are actually just hiding. We click the next thing because we are unhappy with the direction things are going for us.
Start a movement. Not another post that is likely to be forgotten.
“Suddenly we understood that every inflection and movement implies a status and that no action is due to chance, or really ‘motiveless.” – Keith Johnstone
Everything we do involves status. Who’s up and who’s down? In improv, you throw the ball in the air and see who catches it. You say Yes to what happens next. Steve Carrell in his role as Michael Scott beautifully demonstrates what happens when we are consumed with status:
Improv scenes die when the ball is not shared. No one wants to play catch alone. If you are not giving, you are taking. The game is then over.
There is no infinite game here. The only way we play the infinite game is to continue to throw the ball in the air–keeping the game going.
It turns out, this is more than just improv. When you see it, you can’t unsee it.
They haven’t failed us. We have failed them.
Time and time again, I witness the transformation of teens after just two short months when they are given a safe space to be. It’s not rocket science but when someone believes in us and sees our potential, we can’t help but want to step up.
“Worry no more. There’s an open door for you.” – Amos Lee
No one thinks that brushing one’s teeth is vain. It’s just good hygiene. Most agree that braces would also be an acceptable thing to do in our culture today. Some people think elective surgery is vain unless someone is recovering from breast cancer. Yet, working out isn’t seen as vain unless you are building your muscles excessively large. Then again, if you are an athlete, culturally speaking, you get a pass.
Vain has funky standards. An invisible line we draw. And yet…
Vanity is something that happens in our heads. If we do something to feed our obsessive high opinion of ourselves, clearly that is vain. We assume people are vain because of the story we are telling ourselves. Because we can never actually know what is going in, what the voice in their head is saying.
All we know is what we assume.
It’s the first domino to drop that leads to a whole slew of other habits.
It’s setting the alarm every morning at 6 am to start your run.
It’s sitting down every day at sunset to write a blog.
Habits are built on top of other habits. It’s worth examining which habits trigger a bunch more desired behavior and then figuring out how to turn up the dials.
The more limited your choices are, the more critical they become. Because an error feels more devastating when you look around and your back is against the wall.
Alas, your choices are limited by the boundaries based on the conditions we are in.
No one will argue that making three dollars a day limits much of what someone can do with their time and resources. By contrast, if you are watching Netflix one hour per day, you have more choices than you think the conditions allow.
Whether you are mindful or not, time is being consumed. It may be easier to start when you are further along in your journey. But that’s probably a lie you’re telling yourself too. Simply begin. Make a difficult choice that you have been delaying. Go for it and see what happens next.
It is said that Darius the Great charged one of his servants to repeat to him multiple times a day, “Master, remember the Athenians.”
A constant reminder of his enemies.
I’m afraid social media gives us the same reminders.
We use big, broad strokes to put people, ideas and things into categories.
Black/white, gay/straight, rich/poor, disabled/able-bodied.
Yet, any category can be broken down further.
Immigrant, cisgender, bankrupt.
Keep going…
60% African/40% European, celibate, parapelgic, diabetic, IQ of 145.
Every label is used to define what we think is “normal.” Except there is no normal. Attributes are relative and not absolute.
By “normalizing” everything and everyone, we avoid using brainpower to evaluate. Instead, we make snap judgments of how we interpret the world around us.
Indeed, labels influence our judgment and how we decide who gets the benefit of the doubt. Inevitably fueling context. Our culture for too long has thrown people into categories and has treated them less than equal. Perhaps, it’s possible then, with enough attention, we can zero in these categories further and we will no longer overgeneralize large segments of the population based on what we see.
To label is to distinguish it from something else. Think about it.
