News everywhere tells us how broken our foundations are becoming. People speak of lost hope and despair at the stagnancy of our lives. We wonder how things will ever get better for ALL of us. Many times, we’re told to “just drop it, because nothing will change”. And yet every movement towards betterment in society was done by the few who ignored those who chose to stand still. Isn’t this current moment in our time just such a time where more of us need to ignore the accepted and look for ways to finally fix things?
I’ve been thinking heavily about this because I’ve spent the majority of my time trying to make things better from within the system. When you’ve heard your entire life that this is the most efficient way of perpetuating change, you tend to follow the advice of those who seem to know more about the system than you. Until you wake up one day and realize that, maybe just maybe, the system is now on autopilot and really doesn’t want our intelligence. It’s working for the system, so why would it want things to change?
When so many recognize that the broken bough cannot hold on in perpetuity, then it behooves us to look past the system and try working from other directions. Our education lights the way towards how we think things should behave. Without knowledge, we have to rely on others to tell us right from wrong. Just how comfortable would you be with someone telling you how you should act at all times? If you consider yourself to be an individual, then you’ll probably cringe at the thought. And this is where your brains come in. It points you to the information that you should be gathering so that you can use it to create alternatives that work better for you, and that could work better for many others. Education has to be on-going in order for us to recognize when change needs to happen.
Organizations in general require a blind trust that they are doing their best for you. But lately, there is news everywhere that is challenging the notion that they are benevolent and all-seeing. Just like the rest of us, they have personal needs, and those needs will override the collective because it needs to find a middle ground on which to operate. But when the middle ground continues to fail to include the outlying activities that refuse to fit the norm, then we need to look at the signals to understand what is failing. But we need to go past just seeing the failing, because we should also want to fix them. If you’re waiting for someone else to fix a bad situation, then you’ll probably be waiting in vain because others around you are doing the same thing.
When someone tells you that this is the way things have always been done, you should be asking them if the current times match the times when the actions were first developed. Times change so it would be almost impossible to think that the situation will stay the same as when the solution was created. Our creativity and ability to expand upon our knowledge is precisely the tools that we’re given to learn from life…and to improve.
We don’t have to accept that the broken bough is the only branch on which we can stand. There are a lot of branches around us waiting to take on the weight of lives. All of these branches lead to the trunk that will safely hold these branches together so that we have the ability to move from branch to branch as we need to fit where we should be. It’s about time that we find and build solutions where we’re standing, and not on the middle ground. Chances are, there will be others nearby who want to help build a viable alternative that is much better than status quo, so that a new middle ground can take root.
p.s. Check out Great Mind Quotes to see if you find some valuable words that will help you to understand and maybe even motivate.
