Here's
to the crazy ones.
The misfits. The rebels. The
troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The
ones who see things differently.
They're
not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You
can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
About
the only thing you can't do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They
push the human race forward.
And
while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
Because
the people who are crazy enough
to think they can change the world, are the
ones who do.
~Apple,
Inc.
I think most of the time what we really want is a little bit
of peace and quiet, a little bit of tranquility, prosperity, understanding,
relaxation and just the feeling that we’re okay. And often what we get is a whole bunch of
aggravation, irritation, confrontation, conflict, difficulty, challenge, and,
well, one sort of problem after another despite our desire for comfort and
ease. Before we know it, this dis-ease
pulls us this way and that in conflicting directions. So we have to ask ourselves, am I going to
take the bait and allow this to consume me, or am I somehow going to rise above
it? Yet, even when we do nothing there’s
this nagging feeling that we cannot do what we would like to do about these
factors, which exacerbates things quite intensely.
On the one hand we may feel that we want to make a clear and
determined move to do something about “it”—drawing a line in the sand, making a
point and saying, no, I don’t want to have this anymore; yes, I want to sort
this out; I want to move on from this; I want to clear this up and I want to
change something that can’t possibly continue for another moment in its current
form. This desire for change is both
admirable and appropriate, because it’s what spurs us into action. The opportunity for change always exists when
we leave the door open. Yet the speed at which change can come about is the
unknown factor. If we push too hard too
fast, not only do we face extreme burnout and disappointment, we’re likely to
miss something critical to our long-term success; maybe we leave behind someone
or something that ought to come with us on the next leg of our journey. Perhaps we end up with dissent instead of
support. On the other hand, if we do
nothing and they do nothing and we just sit around waiting for change to
happen, it will most surely continue to elude us.
Keep this in mind as you consider your own goals,
resolutions and, perhaps, shortcomings in the new year, and as we look to our
leaders to make it all better following the Fifty-Seventh Presidential
Inauguration and the swearing in of President Barack Obama to a second term in
office.
Real change—thoughtful change—takes time. It doesn’t happen without some effort. The longer I live and the more I experience
of the world the more I tend to side with the science fiction writers who have
long maintained that time is not necessarily a linear thing. We see it as something that has a beginning,
middle, and an end; we see the past as something to move away from as we step
into the future.
But perhaps time isn’t such a straight shot. Maybe it’s more of a circular thing or a
twisty swirly thing and instead of darting ahead, trying to get from where we
are now to where we think we need to be by forging the quickest, most direct
path forward, we should be looking back to our past, to our history, and re-examining
some things that we thought were done, re-reading some case files that we
thought were closed, to see what else might be there for us to learn from; with
the goal of understanding how by re-writing our history or changing our
perspective from what’s gone before we can empower ourselves, individually and
collectively, for the future.
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