The challenge of the winter solstice and misunderstanding leadership
This morning on the way to charge the sign said 34 degrees (1C). The sun was so low on the horizon the usually sunny places I normally charge were in shadow most of the day.
The solstice is three weeks away. It will be darker and colder for another three weeks. Then it will be another three weeks to come back to this long a day, though it will be colder.
A friend told me she figured not many people would want to live this way, going outside for hours in the cold, not using appliances like a fridge. I was surprised. Who wants to live like this? The point of changing culture is to make living sustainable normal, as it was for 250,000 years of human existence.
How can people think my goal is to live like this?
Do they look at the Wright brothers and consider them failures for not producing a 747?
Did they think Martin Luther King boycotted buses because he wanted everyone to walk everywhere?
Do they think the point of a marathon is to cross the starting line?
Do they have no knowledge of how progress happens?
I’m doing what has to be done here and now because there’s no other time or place to be or act. No one could make a 747 without the Wright brothers’ rudimentary plane. It was a proof of concept, as is what I’m doing.
Yes, it isn’t fun to sit in the cold to where I can’t move my extremities, but people lived on this island almost ten thousand years. It’s not that much a struggle, but even if it weren’t at all, my short-term individual actions are not the point.
Changing American and global culture is the point, through a joyful path that creates reward and gratitude.
On the way, I don’t mind sharing the struggle of dark and cold if that’s what success takes.
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