Emergent strategy
Incremental impact
Accumulative kindness
This is how I choose to change the world.
As a neurodivergent person, I am learning all of the different traits and patterns that make me who I am now that I have all of the information to complete the puzzle of me.
One of the things I have always known that I can now come to embrace even more, is that I have always had the most impactful human relationships when they were able to be cultivated deeply. If we’re 1-1, I can go all in on you. I can learn you, hear you, know you, tune into you in ways that I can’t when there’s a crowd distracting me. Now I also know that the crowds overstimulate me. But when it’s a 1-1 relationship, the other person is my special interest.
For example, if someone announced to a group that they completed an accomplishment, my congratulations may be the quietest one. Probably because I’m lowkey just trying to survive in that social setting; nothing to do with the actual announcement. But if you told me that 1-1, I might light up when you say it. I might go to the store that day and buy you the most you gift I can find so that you can truly know how much you deserve this, and how damn amazing you are.
I approach changing the world with that same lens.
God, my heart breaks to see wars going on that are causing children to starve and suffer. I hate knowing that we’re on this side of the phone screen sitting in air conditioning, swiping past the videos because we can. Because we have the privilege to. Because we have the privilege to not even have to see if we don’t want to. And as we’re choosing not to watch, as I choose not to watch, they don’t know whether they’ll even be alive tomorrow.
But I can’t consume this content all day. I want to help, and I wish I could throw myself into any and everything that I could to change their reality, but that isn’t realistic for me.
So instead, I focus on incremental impacts in the ways that I can influence. Can I help to enlighten someone on the research that they can do to influence their local politics? Can I help to increase the number of eyes and ears that are paying attention to what is happening? Can I help shift their mindset to think more constructively and inclusively in the way that they perceive immigration, genocide, or social justice as a whole?
And at the root, always at the back of my mind, can I help people to be kinder and more mindful of one another in general?
I read this book called “Emergent Strategy” by Adrienne Maree Brown. (Do yourself the favor and pick up one of her books.) adrienne maree brown – awe. liberation. pleasure.
This book changed my life. (This and a series of other life changing revelations, learnings, experiences at that time).
My favorite part of this book was this idea of fractals. This asks us to consider that patterns will repeat on different scales. When I think of this, I consider the example that:
If I am kind, gentle, and offer positive assumption to everyone around me, which then extends from them to the people around them, I can exponentially impact a culture shift from destruction and division to community and grace.
I love this idea so much that I wrote it in a poem.
Fractal patterns emerge as a system iterates within a given set of rules or principles that inform the behaviors of the system agents at all scales.
In nature, branching occurs as trees grow and rivers flow. In humans we see branching in family “trees” and in the spreading of information beyond the point of origin. Wonderful ideas and amazing creations can branch out from one core idea.
– Fractals: A Lever to Change the World, By Royce Holladay Fractals: A Lever to Change the World (hsdinstitute.org)
I may not be able to change the world. But if I can impact the world immediately around me just by sharing what I have learned and hoping others find it to be impactful too, then I feel I have changed something. I have contributed something. By being a valuable member of my community, by supporting that community, leaning into that community, I have played some part.
Each time I talk about the dimensions of difference, or influence someone to think of conflict not as destructive or harmful, but as constructive and a skill that can be built, I have contributed something. I have helped my community.
Each time we talk about individual, institutional, and systemic racism and oppression and build that awareness, we have contributed something.
Each time we talk about one another, our neighbors, and our international brothers and sisters with care and consideration, humanizing them, calling attention to their existence, fears, life, pain, we have contributed something.
Each time we are able to share a post for awareness about voting, or awareness about genocide, these fractals can be repeated at scale. And eventually, as with history, these will repeat and repeat until they echo, loudly, and on a large scale.
The goal is to send good into the world. Send awareness. Send grace. Send love.
Not to recycle harm.
Fractals. Increments. What can we practice? What values can we hold? What micro chasms can we create? What vision can we echo? What knowledge can we share? What can we do to create the overall emergence of a better world by contributing our own individual actions into a collaborative, community effort?
Emergence is the fact of something becoming known or starting to exist, or the action of appearing by coming out from behind something.
Z's Comfort Zone 