Slow Change Can Be Radical Change

. Real change happens on the level of the gesture. It’s one person doing one thing differently than he or she did before.

The change got handed up before it got handed down, and only the slow perspective, the long view, lets you see the power that lies in ordinary people, in movements, in campaigns that often are seen as unrealistic, extreme, aiming for the impossible at their inception.

Change takes time and it usually happens fitfully — nothing, slowly, nothing, slowly, nothing, nothing, and then boom: Change. If there was an emoji formula for change, it would be: Δ =….💧..💧..💧.💧💧💧..💦 ..🌊

although people usually overestimate how much will change quickly, we almost always underestimate how much can change over decades. One of the reasons is that big changes require many small things to shift in tandem, including how we think. That takes time. But once those changes have happened, the world really does look radically different.

A lot of activists seem to have a mechanistic view of change, or perhaps they expect what quack diet pills offer, “Quick and easy results guaranteed.” They expect finality, definitiveness, straightforward cause-and-effect relationships, instant returns, and as a result they specialize in disappointment, which sinks in as bitterness, cynicism, defea

Here, in my late thirties, I want to learn his nature-slowness. This, for me, is a change. It is the opposite of the kinds of drama that used to make me feel reassuringly alive. But I think I’m finally getting it. This kind of living isn’t the absence of story or of life. It’s just a story happening so slowly you can’t really see it taking place. I