adrienne maree brown: "connection to each other is the most important thing to cultivate in the face of hopelessness..."

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Understanding that you can be wrong, have been wrong, helps to increase the compassion needed to work through the emotional and material impacts of being wronged by another.

We often think that we must hold our position, regardless of what we learn or feel. But in fact, the opposite is true. We must learn to develop positions together, adapting to the changing conditions around us - sometimes this means we must relinquish our positions, to voice our feelings and thoughts, and hear and be influenced, by other people's opinions and information. Dialectical humanism suggests that mature humans actually need to be able to adjust beliefs and plans in the realm of changing conditions.

I know there is this idea that we grow less radical as we age, and that relinquishing radical positions is a way this manifests. This keeps people from allowing themselves to be open to their own new emotions, their new understandings. I think the truth is that, as we age, we realize the world is more complex, and we allow ourselves to get woven into that complexity. I am more radical now than I was ten years ago, although it may not look like it. I am more radical in my body, I am more radical in my clarity about the apocalyptic future and my belief that connection to each other is the most important thing to cultivate in the face of hopelessness - we don't want to cling to outdated paradigms; we want to cling to each other and shift the paradigms.

The world is changing all the time."

- adrienne maree brown, from Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Shaping Worlds



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