The way to make deep, lasting change is to be as boring as possible.
No flair. You sneak up on the change, like a cat stalking its prey. You tell no one you’re doing it. You waste no time asking others for their advice about your goal. You devote your planning and thinking not to the end result, but rather to the smallest possible action you can take. You make the first step so absurdly small, so trivial, that it’s laughable that you would call that a step towards change.
The goals we make as individuals feel tangible, even if they’re lofty. But when we consider our capacity and ability to contribute to change at the level of the social and political, suddenly our field of vision expands. What we are trying to change is larger and harder to break into small pieces.
What would it be like to think of activism as a kind of mycelium network, a super organism, matching in its structure the complexity and networked aspects of ideological constructions like patriarchy and white supremacy? How could a movement shift and adapt to current conditions, the way the ideologies of patriarchy and white supremacy constantly shape-shift to contain the political threats to their power? What if you saw yourself as a tiny, hairlike thread, one singular component of a vast web of change-making?
Then, what your current skills, interests, particular obsessions and talents—what you already have, who you already are—would be of vast importance to the networked whole.
If all you had to be was one tiny thread, what would you do?
