Starting something

In our joined up world of communications, it's easy to feel swamped and powerless. But, no matter how much we turn off the news, it doesn't go away. National and international is the stage on which we all live now. And in truth, it's the stage on which we have all, always, lived.

In the past we didn't know it so vividly. The impact of and knowledge of actions propagated more slowly through the world. The here and now was better insulated by time from elsewheres, and from futures.

But.

A simple increase in speed has changed the nature of communication. If word of mouth is the principal mode of communication, then some context naturally adheres. You knew something of the actors, of the places, of the meanings - and as the message travelled further and the context dropped away, so did the message's power. Now our messages can be picked up and whirled away on a tide of social media. They can end up far from their context without losing their freshness and the power that comes with it. They can have real effects in places, and ways, that were never intended.

An apparently powerful person or act rides on a tide of other acts, attitudes, and people. Other acts, unsupported by such a tide, seem futile. Yet the apparently futile act may start start something instead of being lost in the noise. The apparently powerful one may be nothing more than a random piece of flotsam: prominent but passive.

We cannot comfort ourselves that it doesn't matter what we do. It might not, but then again, it really might. And it really might not be what we meant to do. The world has become precarious; how can we dare to act at all, in this unwieldy, enormous, joined up world?

We cannot get out of it. Disengagement from politics, from communication is also an act. Even disengagement from life by suicide is an act, and one not available for any fine-tuning afterwards.

One thing I am certain of is that we cannot tell in advance what acts will make a difference, and what the difference is they will make. Contexts and perspectives on any single issue expand in all directions and we cannot appreciate them all, even in hindsight.

We're left with guesswork - about both the likely effects and the likely effectiveness of our actions. But guesswork is what people are good at. We struggle when we have too much clarity, we get bored, we get miserable. We are much better when we don't quite know: then we get curious, we try things out, learn from experience, imagine possibilities and use a blend of thought and intuition to decide what to try next.

Every day, make your best guess about what to do. And then do it. You may be part of a tide, or lost in the noise, that's not the point. The point is to make your response, to your context. Whatever it is: participate in the world. There's actually nothing else you can do.