What’s wrong with the world
Note: This is a re-post (with adjustments) from the last two years around the same period. Around Christmas has been a time of reflection in my life, and this is one of the core messages I find continuously relevant and worth reminding, so a tradition is born here.
G.K. Chesterton, British writer and philosopher, was once asked to provide an answer to the question: “what’s wrong with the world”?
He provided the simplest yet most powerful answer anyone could think of:
“I am”.
It’s powerful because it speaks to the core of any issue or matter:
What can I do about it?
That’s what we should always focus on: the things we can change, or influence. Do something about those, and hopefully that will make other things better too, through the complexity of oblique (indirect) ways.
It’s both a call for action and a deep reflection at the same time.
I bring this up today because normally this time of the year is a time of reflection for me. Being a Christian, coming from a Judaeo-Christian tradition and culture, but also more recently for living in the Northern hemisphere and facing the winter cold during the same period.
Although, as this blog/newsletter name conveys, I am very conceptual in my thinking, so believe that anything starts with an idea, a theory, otherwise we are just talking about sheer random trial and error; I have learned to become very practical and pragmatic. And thanks to that…
“…do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own” – Matthews 6:34 (Bible)
That has served me well. And while it can be said as being obvious, I have experienced enough to understand that the obvious is often worth reiterating, remembering… For there is still too much out there of living in some sort of idealism, the ‘what-ifs’ – of some unrealistic expectation in context. What might be sometimes even desirable in an ideal world – but guess what? Life is not always fair… yet still beautiful in its mess...
Perhaps that is because the whole point is what we can make out of it, what we can learn, what we can take on as responsibility and do something about it. Being a positive influence in our circle of influence, our own sort of fractal of the world, if you like.
And as the saying goes, ultimately…
Be the change (or the difference) we want to see in the world!
With that, I would like to wish you a Merry Christmas, if you do celebrate it. In any case, a great end of year and (Gregorian) New Year. I won't be posting this year anymore, and I'm having a short pause until early January. The next post should come out on January 10th.
Hope to ‘see’ you back here!
by Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect (I only refuse invites from people clearly with an agenda to ‘coldly’ sell something to me), happy to engage and interact