Systems Change

Systems change. Sometimes violently, sometimes gradually, always imperceptibly at first.

They do this seemingly without your involvement. External forces at play, bigger than you and always moving. Time marching swiftly on, carrying everyone along with it. In reality, we're all part of the whole, and the micro moves in lock-step with the macro. But most of this happens without any conscious effort.

The bind then is the identification. If you identify with the system and its values, it carries you as part of itself. If you don't, it seems to do it anyway. What then do you do? What if you're not aligned with the system and where it's heading?

Repeatedly, you see that the system will rise and fall. If you choose to identify with it, deeply, in a manner that is internalised, earnest, and total, then you too will rise and fall with it. Again, the question is one of relationship. You may exist within the system, but you are not of it. You have, therefore, a choice. A choice to identify with something internal, the loud voice that sprouts not from the outside, but from the inside.

This is a choice. It's one that's been made many times. It's a choice of insecurity over false comfort, of unpredictability over control.

It's one that places interiority over exteriority. And therefore, it is not resistant to change, but unaffected by it.