For LitHub, Rebecca Solnit offers a salve to those fighting for change, be it personal or political. Dramatic turning points are rare and happen most often in the movies; the change we seek only comes after years and years of dedication, baby step after baby step taken on faith.
Anyone who’s gotten over a heartbreak or a bereavement knows that there aren’t five stages of grief you pass through like they were five whistlestop towns on the train route. You are more this way one day and more that way the other, looping and regressing, and maybe building reconciliation or acceptance like a log cabin while living in sorrow, rather than sliding into it like you were stealing third base.
You want tomorrow to be different than today, and it may seem the same, or worse, but next year will be different than this one, because those tiny increments added up. The tree today looks a lot like the tree yesterday, and so does the baby. A lot of change is undramatic growth, transformation, or decay, or rather its timescale means the drama might not be perceptible to the impatient.
And we are impatient creatures, impatient for the future to arrive and prone to forgetting the past in our urgency to have it all now, and sometimes too impatient to learn the stories of how what is best in our era was made by long, slow campaigns of change. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that “the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice,” but whichever way it bends you have to be able to see the arc (and I’m pretty sure by arc he meant a gradual curve, not an acute angle as if history suddenly took a sharp left). Sometimes seeing it is sudden, because change has been going on all along but you finally recognize it.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/S2lJB5i
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/EucjCo4
