Often, this is how big healing and change can begin: We finally let a small thing be a big thing.
This is a common moment in my work with clients. Maybe they want a loving relationship after a series of abusive ones. Good goal! Those relationships are over, but now there is loneliness, and a painful longing for a truly healthy bond persists. They say, what’s wrong with me that I can have that?
With great gentleness, I say “Is is okay if I congratulate you on not being in a new abusive relationship?” Then they smile a little, seeing the scale of the mountain they are trying to climb, and finally notice, they’ve made headway; they aren’t where they were; they are moving toward the better thing.
This is hugely motivating! Similarly, only noticing we have NOT made the goal yet is de-motivating. Noticing our steps are making a difference, even if only a small difference, even if all it is that we’re not repeating the same old mistakes, can we congratulate ourselves for a moment?
Hey, I love miracle cures as much as the next person! They do happen! And, mostly, they don’t. Change and healing is incremental, not because we don’t want the big end goal, but because it’s new, and we have to test it, and who are we if suddenly we go from being x to being y? Oh, so many good reasons for slow change.
But our culture is primed to dismiss it, if it sees it at all. Six Figures in Six Months! No ever and A minuses for me! Everything or nothing. Enjoying a small change is seen as weak, or compromised, or somehow inadequately manifested.
Now, I do admit there can be good reasons for urgency — the pain has been too great for too long; the injustice has endured without interruption for forever. Small steps don’t feel like steps at all. Sometimes, situations are sincerely that urgent, and incrementalism is its own form of injustice.
It takes some discernment to to see when that is true, and when it might not be true. The fact is, so much of our lives and collective needs don’t match that situation. Child mortality has gone down drastically through many small steps over many years. Similarly for world literacy, women’s empowerment, the victory over Jim Crow, and so many other meaningful successes, where the people who stayed in the fight did so only to see the small advancement, and then hand it off to others. And the children have a better life now.
Something very important is at stake here. If we aren’t able to stand by the small victories, then all we see is many dispiriting failures and losses, and then no one advances — not ourselves in our own lives, and not society. This way lies despair and cynicism.
Can you see the small step that makes a difference for you or your world? Share your personal experiences and larger observations on my blog, below.
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