When people think of changing the world, we understandably think big. We imagine a world without racism, without poverty, without violence, and so many other worthy wishes. The more we learn about complex broken systems, structural inequity, and widespread injustice, the bigger and more complex our plans become.
There is no doubt that undoing inequity takes big ideas, longterm commitment, and plenty of strategic thinking. It is important to name the future we want and recognize that change at such a scale takes time.
However, this someday-focused approach can push off efforts for transformation into an unspecified future. There is need to embrace a paradox (multiple truths in tension with each other) in social change - it takes years and it takes minutes.
Imagining the transformed society that we aspire to can lead to paralysis. After naming the future we want, and describing the conditions that will characterize it, we come face-to-face with the immense challenges of birthing them.
To make matters worse, we can become consumed with the shortcomings we see in others and all the reasons to be skeptical that change is ever possible, let alone likely. Rather than embody the characteristics of the world we want to inhabit, we redouble our commitment to the destructive behaviors we ought to be abandoning.
It is useful, then, to think of the change that can be made in the next 60 minutes.
There's nothing particularly important about 60 minutes specifically, except that so much of our life in the west is broken up into hour-long increments. In fact, the destructive practices and actions that dehumanize, divide, and devastate so many of our communities take far less than 60 minutes. Apathy, dismissal, ignorance, and rejection become second nature and require little effort after a while.
So, 60 minutes dedicated to living intentionally different ways of being in our communities is a radical departure from the norm. If the world is made moment by moment, then it is also changed as we string together moments of reflection and action that serve social and environmental justice.
This can be a freeing revelation for those of us who feel the weight of longterm, systemic change. We create the large-scale change by living the next 60 minutes differently. By doing life differently now, we change the future on the other side of these interactions.
However, this does not mean we are released from deep reflection, careful visioning, and strategic consideration of the path we must make by walking. Instead, it requires self-knowledge, critical consciousness, and serious commitment. And most of all, it requires that we have done the inner work necessary to embody the values we wish to bring into being.
Integrity as a community leader means, among other things, an integrated self where the values and wisdom gained through reflection animate our actions, plans, and practices in the seemingly mundane of everyday life.
It means that we have 60 minutes to change the world. And if we screw it up, we start the clock again, giving grace to ourselves and our companions in the work for social and environmental justice.
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