Writings

A friend showed me this video yesterday. I really, really appreciated it. Seems like a reminder that’s needed in a lot of places around the world in this season.

Something appearing impossible isn’t, on its own, a legitimate reason not to try.

When a new project, decision, or chapter-of-life comes our way, there also quite often seems to come a simple but nearly-invisible choice for us to make: We can chose the easy path, where we proceed “the way we’ve always done it”, going forward well-founded on the ideas and knowledge that we’ve already acquired and tested over the years… Or, we can chose the more scary path that forces us to learn new things — the path that requires we get stretched in our knowledge, skills, and understanding — the path where not growing and adapting, or not learning that new tool or process, would mean that we simply don’t succeed....

Today marks two months since the February 6th earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria. I’ve been finding it difficult to believe that. It feels like just few days ago that I woke up to dozens of messages from people around the world checking in to see if we were safe. It feels like just a few days ago that we filled up vehicles with as many supplies as we could fit, and drove the 12+ hour route to try to help some of those hardest hit and least helped by the quakes....

I’ve been pondering generosity a lot lately. There’s a lot going on in the world to make one feel lack. Natural disasters, economic crisis, war, huge accidents resulting in ecological devastation, bank collapses, unemployment threats and spikes due to new unprecedented technologies… And that was just these last 3 months. It can be tempting to become stingy in the face of such situations. If we live in a universe of scarcity, then hoarding and stockpiling feels like the logical thing to do....

We all know the rules — don’t cross the line; stay in line; don’t get out of line. Whether it came from our education, our parents, or just the factory-based industrial economies that our cultures have reformed themselves around these last 200 years, we know that to be a good worker (and, maybe, a good person?) means to respect the line. But, the world is changing. And with it changes our relationship with “the line”....

I’ve been continuing to put my efforts towards seeing more toilets rolled out to those effected by the February earthquakes. In that process, there has been a surprising amount of managerial work that has needed to be done. First, beyond the obvious stuff of bringing the materials to be able to physically build these toilets into the earthquake zone (which was a project itself), we needed to create a poster with instructions on it so people could learn how to use these toilets safely and effectively....

It’s easy for us to get caught up trying to constantly deal with the deluge of problems we face day-to-day, putting out each fire as it arises. There are times where that “always on” mode of dealing with problems is indeed necessary. But it seems to me that the problems we face day-to-day are many times the direct results of different up-stream problems that we don’t always recognize. These are problems that cause other problems....

After the utterly tragic earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria on February 6th of this year, my friends and I have been doing our best to help those affected. We’re just a small group, so we can’t help at the scale that big NGOs with millions of dollars of funding can do. But, we do speak Turkish, and we have been on the ground with people affected. So, we have been able to get to know people’s situations a little more one-on-one and personally than some big international organizations might be able to do....

When everything appears to be working well, the most important question to ask is: “What could make this break?” But, when everything seems to be broken, the most important question to ask is: “What needs to happen to make this work?”