Empowerment

I can’t prevent devastating storms, keep my local grocery store from selling out of my favorite product, or make someone else behave in a way that is more convenient for my preferences. These are issues over which I have little or no control.

When our desires slam into the reality of our situational impotence, it can stoke feelings of insufficiency, fragility, and worthlessness.

We might feel like stepping back from life a little bit, because what’s the point? Bad things happen, we can’t stop them from happening, so why even flail around, wasting our time and energy on things we have no chance of changing?

This is an understandable response, and we’re all vulnerable to a sense of futility resulting from either a cold assessment of an out-of-scale issue, or an effort that fails to result in our hoped-for outcomes.

It’s worth remembering, though, that even if we can’t control the weather, we can adjust the thermostat. Or failing that, we can don or doff our unseasonable clothing.

The global food system may be suffering under the weight of a thousand systemic afflictions and imperfections, but that doesn’t prevent us from making adjustments to our own shopping and eating habits, based on the resources we have available and the goals we hope to achieve.

Human rights and democratic values are under fire from a thousand different directions, on a scale we’ll be struggling with for generations. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t vote, shouldn’t support causes we believe in, and shouldn’t make positive changes to our discourse and community-level structures whenever we see the opportunity to do so.

An inclination toward assuming personal helplessness is seductive.

It allows us feel that—because many of the issues we face are too big for any one of us to tackle—there’s no point in concerning ourselves with the things we might improve.

That we as singular human beings cannot solve all the world’s problems does not mean we cannot solve any problems.

The fact that we are not all-powerful does not mean we aren’t powerful.

Our effective domains are not as big as we might prefer, and the leverage we wield, as individuals, may not be sufficient to make all the changes we hope to see in the world.

But we can make changes in our own lives. We can make changes in the lives of our friends, families, and communities.

And we can add our modest strength to that of our peers to accomplish whatever we decide to accomplish; provided we can muster the will to do so.

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