Modern “change” culture may create an impression that those oriented toward continuity, care, craft, mastery, preservation, relationship, beauty, stability, or stewardship are somehow less vital — or even less committed to humanity’s future — than those oriented toward disruption and reinvention.
I do not believe this for a second.
In fact, the more I practice changemaking, the more reverence I feel for people whose primary contribution to the world may not be transformation at all. My last post introduced the 6 attributes of changemakers. Now, I turn to the people whose contributions let changemakers do their thing. Theirs is not secondary work. It is civilization.
I am increasingly aware that my changemaking has been made possible by countless people who are probably not changemakers themselves.
The teachers who honed my potential. The people who ensured my scholarships were credited correctly to my university tuition accounts. Those who made sure I ate something wholesome. The friends who tethered me back to reality when I became a hot air balloon buoyed too far upward by causes and ideas.
I owe everything I have accomplished — and likely much of what I still will — to people who built the roads I travel on, ensured fresh water and air, grew my food, tended to my health, and created art that kept weaving me back into humanity while I wrestled with how it might need to change.
What studying changemakers has shown me
* Changemaking is real. Not merely as a buzzword or aspirational personal brand, but as a recognizable practice of transformation.
* Some individuals — I refer to them as changemakers — appear uniquely predisposed toward changemaking. They persistently ask: Why is it like this? Why do we accept this? Could this work differently? What would it take to change it? Goodness knows we need people willing to question inevitability, challenge harmful systems, imagine and build alternatives, and continue long after exhaustion, cynicism, self-interest, or social pressure would convince many others to stop. For more, see my last post: https://changemakershandbook.substack.com/p/how-to-spot-a-change-maker-signs
* Our future equally depends on the people whose contributions take entirely different forms. I have become equally convinced that changemakers depend on people oriented toward many other equally vital forms of human contribution.
* Importantly, changemakers do not have exclusive dibs on creating change. Nor does it mean that changemakers cannot care deeply about continuity, ethics, beauty, relationship, or stewardship.
The more I study changemakers, the more I think of them as something like a society’s immune system.
At their best, changemakers help societies detect harm, aim higher, adapt, and regenerate. At their worst, they are destabilizing, reckless, and destructive.
Weak immune systems are dangerous, but so are overactive ones. Left entirely to themselves, changemakers might redesign civilization incessantly. Some of those redesigns would be extraordinary. Some would be catastrophic. All would be exhausting.
Human flourishing has probably always depended on many different forms of devotion existing alongside one another.
Which may be one reason changemakers need not only to hone their own strengths, but to cherish the countless contributions that keep us alive, connected, nourished, honest, safe, or sane long enough to do our thing at all.
A future worth building takes both
Perhaps maturity — especially for changemakers — involves finally recognizing that people who do not share our particular fixation on transformation are not necessarily barriers to the future we want. They may be part of the reason we survive long enough to build it.
Are you a changemaker?
I have been building a survey (stay tuned) to help explore that question, based on six recurring attributes my research increasingly points toward, to better understand one particular orientation toward change — and how it exists alongside many other equally vital forms of human contribution.
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Image credit: Eleanor Smith from Pixabay
