In the long run saving yourself requires saving the world

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“when I pronounce the word Future; the first syllable already belongs to the past.”

Wislawa Szymborska

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Frames of minds change by jumps or leaps, not by degrees. Yeah. Big jumps from seemingly little things and little steps and little changes is the norm. I begin there to say that saving yourself requires saving the world. To be clear. I don’t think most people need ‘saving’ as in being rescued from something. What I mean today is maximizing your potential means saving the world around you so that you can manifest your own destiny. I imagine this is a version of context matters but, in this case, I am suggesting that, mentally, you have to purposefully save the environment (large, medium and small versions of) in order for you to thrive.

Which leads me to things are getting better; invest in it.

The world is strewn with good things. In fact, I would argue there are more good things than bad things (albeit the bad things are often really bad). This is where I remind everyone of a famous Peter Drucker thought. “It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.” The good stuff in the world is the first rate stuff. Invest in making that, and those things, excellent. I would suggest this is, mentally, like long term planning versus long term responsibility. The difference is between trying to control the future and trying to give the future the tools to help itself. I imagine this can be a bit difficult because the past is both a comfort and a warning. The world and all its trappings stands on the past and it can be pretty easy to decide to focus on destroying some of the things OF the past because its easier than deciding what to build for the future. Here is the good news. Lots of good shit is already being built or is being offered up to be built; invest in those things rather than the destruction of the past. I would argue that ‘better’ is simply found in shattering the continuity of the past, not erase it, from which new patterns emerge. Within that thought resides the concept that continuity and perpetual renewal coexist, and thrive, together, but that is another thought for another day.

Which leads me to saving the world.

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“Society, community , family are all conserving institutions.

They try to maintain stability, and to prevent, or at least slow down change. But organizations are organized with the intent to destabilize. Because its function is to put knowledge to work – on tools, processes and products; on work; on knowledge itself – it must be organized for constant change.”

Peter Drucker

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‘Saving the world’ is about conserving our future (so that we can thrive) and, yet, the world is strewn with conserving institutions seeking to self-perpetuate themselves, i.e., conserve themselves, and not the world.

Therein lies the core issue to my suggestion.

I imagine most of us find ourselves waking up many days thinking ‘wow … I would love to improve (save) the world somehow today’ <either consciously or subconsciously> and yet we end the day seemingly not even having nudged Life in a positive <improving> direction. Frankly, this struggle increases a feeling of negativity which can easily consume your life if you are not careful. Between society encouraging things that don’t feel right for you, a ‘conserving’ environment, unhappy friends, media generating anxiety rating point by rating point by convincing us the world is going to end, or angry trolls on social media, it can seem overwhelmingly negative as you view all of this versus what you felt when you first woke up in the morning. Yeah. But. Remember. Saving yourself may mean saving the world. All the negative shit is just words (mostly), not actions and behaviors and ideas and thoughts. The majority of the world is good and doing and thinking good stuff. Maybe we just need to remember that everyday in order to save the world and, consequently, save ourselves. All that said. Maybe that is why I love this Brian Andreas quote “we wake up in the morning knowing ‘who I am’ without anyone trying to tell us otherwise.” So, yeah, maybe in the long run saving yourself means saving the world. Ponder.