What’s one thing you want to start next year?
Reset — December 27, 2023
Thinking about solving the overlapping social and ecological crises our world is facing can feel like a non-starter. The problems are so big, and we are so small.
But one of our very favorite thinkers, adrienne maree brown, offers another perspective on our place in this vast and tangled knot:
“Small is good, small is all. The large is a reflection of the small.”
For us, this was a huge unlock: the idea that what we do in our tiny little corners of the world can be a reflection of the bigger change we want to see.
We had another big breakthrough while jamming together on climate communications work. We realized the paradigm of calls-to-action is a recipe for powerlessness. Knowing what to do doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to do it. And knowing how to do it doesn’t matter if you don’t know where to start.
It’s those starting points — those tiny yet gigantic moments of shifting from one way of being to another — that make all the difference.
As we reflect on the year ahead, how might we move from trying to solve all-the-things to starting small, and finding the right places to start? We offer today’s reading as its own starting point, to dream into what it means to start small.
Today’s practice is a reading from adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. The full excerpt is here, but we’ll elevate one favorite clip that calls back to the Grace Lee Boggs quote from last chapter:
“This may be the most important element to understand—that what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system.
Grace Lee Boggs articulated it in what might be the most-used quote of my life: ‘Transform yourself to transform the world.’ This doesn’t mean to get lost in the self, but rather to see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the Planet.”
Today’s practice
Crowdsourcing wisdom
Each day, we’ll invite you to share your own insights — because we have this hunch that each of us holds pieces of the answer, and Blossom is all about bringing those pieces together.
Tell us…
Do you have any hacks for starting small?