if you want to change the world, you gotta learn to love change ✌️
the hardest and best lesson I've ever learned about embracing my inner chaos monster
For most of my life, I have wanted to change the world. Maybe you have too.
We’re the ones who can’t stop noticing what’s not working. Who fall asleep rearranging systems in our heads. Who feel the distance between how things are and how they could be like a stone in our shoe.
Lately I’ve been noticing that wanting the world to change is decidedly NOT the same as enjoying the actual changing part.
Wanting the world to change costs me nothing. I can want it from the couch. The institutions should change. The systems should turn over. The people who refuse to get it should finally get it.
I can believe every word of that, loudly, while my own life stays exactly where I like it.
Enjoying the world changing is a whole different thing.
The world changing doesn’t stay out there at a comfortable distance. It comes home. It rearranges the room I had just gotten comfortable in. It takes the plan I made and stops it from working. It takes the thing I was sure of and messes it all up.
And, it so rarely feels like linear, forward progress.
the windless room
Years ago, scientists sealed a glass world into the Arizona desert and called it Biosphere 2. They planted trees inside. The trees grew fast, and then they fell over. They couldn’t hold their own weight.
It took a while to understand why. The dome had no wind. And trees, it turns out, need wind. The push of weather is what tells a tree to lay down the dense, stubborn wood that lets it stand. Without that stress, the trees shot up tall and hollow and collapsed under themselves.
The protection was the thing that killed them.
If possibility is what’s left when certainty falls apart, then the falling apart part isn’t the disaster.
It’s the doorway.
The uncertainty we fight so hard against is the same thing as the possibility we say we want. They aren’t two separate states. They’re one state, felt from both sides.
A world that is settled has already decided how it ends, and there’s no room left for change.
You can’t have the new world without the uncertainty. The uncertainty is how the new world gets in.
Everything we say we want is on the far side of being willing to not know.
The world we’re reaching for is in there, in the part we can’t see yet.
FYI: Each week I share stories through For People and Planet, a newsletter focused on climate solutions and hope for the future. You can find it here if you’d like to follow along: forpeopleandpla.net
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With love, Bri Chapman
The times I have most enjoyed working on changing the world have been when I was working with other people I enjoyed working with, even when the work itself was difficult.
This was really powerful, Bri. That image of those trees without wind failing to thrive will stay with me.
And THIS: "If possibility is what’s left when certainty falls apart, then the falling apart part isn’t the disaster. It’s the doorway."
Thank you always.