For When You Think Policy Change Can’t Happen
There were ashtrays in our desks! a woman once told me of her 1960s college days. The professors usually taught in a cloud of smoke.
Totally inconceivable now, I shook my head.
Well, the woman said, now - she gestured to the smoke-free office we were in, which was next to a string of smoke-free restaurants where the closest you could light up was 20 feet away - would have been inconceivable to us then.
There are many who make their daily bread by predicting the future. Not with tea leaves or tarot cards. But with definitive statements to the press about what the White House will do, how an election will break, whether the Senate will move such-and-such bill.
“I’ll tell you how this story ends,” they might say.
“There is no way that...”
“It’s absolutely going to...”
They say it with such certainty, that folks looking to break the tyranny of uncertainty start parroting them.
But there’s just one hitch, my dear friends: these talking heads, pundits, professional know-it-alls are frequently wrong.
"There is much more room in the heart of a don’t-know-it-all,” wrote Elizabeth Lesser.
It’s just that don’t-know-it-alls don’t make for great TV or podcasts. Rare is the pundit who will be booked a second time after saying, “I choose to abide in not knowing.” It doesn't feed that primal human hunger to know what’s going to happen.
Easily, then, reality is bent by the perceptions of the certain ones, the definitive ones.
The ones who never could have predicted that hospice - a totally unfamiliar concept in the United States in 1972 - would be federally funded by 1982 (great story on that here).
Or that lead would be banned from paint. Seatbelts would be mandated in cars, safety lids would be required on pill bottles.
Or that classrooms, restaurants, workplaces, hospitals would be smoke-free.
"The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole,” wrote Carl Jung.
What we think is absolutely, positively inconceivable now might not be for someone a decade from today.
So when the confident people, the definitive people, say something can’t happen or won’t happen, no need to put our paw in that bear trap.
Our work is to join the long, mighty legacy of those who keep their eyes steadily trained on what they can do now so that what seems inconceivable this day is just one inch closer to conceivable the next.
(Looking for actions to take? A few easy, high-impact ones here, here, and here.)
Or as John Henry Newman said, "We do not ask to see the distant scene. One step is enough for us today."
Know someone in need of a pick-me-up? Why not forward this post along to them!