Going for Too Much?

Bit By Bit
Go big, or go home. I used to be enamored by the allure of fostering large-scale change that would catalyze more sustainable behaviors and practices. However, the potential of more modest shifts has been occupying my attention lately. I’ve experienced this in my yoga practice, finding that a series of smaller, more accessible adjustments can add up over time. Striving for bigger ones often resulted in fatigue, injury or frustration. Achieving these more minute inflections, however, demands a more focused and disciplined level of concentration, and forfeiting the yearning for the ego-gratifying big win. Working on sustainability-focused innovation projects, I’m impatient to address as many of the significant barriers as possible, those that are inhibiting more people from experiencing a superior quality of life, whether related to food, energy, natural resources, or community and economic development. I feel pressure from peers, funders and myself to concoct paradigm-shifting undertakings. But I’m realizing that there is another, potentially more powerful path. By focusing on building capacity, carefully shaping details, and building more slowly, deliberately, and perhaps even virtuosically, something powerful might emerge, however lacking in ambition it might initially seem to the rest of the world.