“Look, beloved, if you are going to protest, for or against anything, bring to it the same intelligence, creativity and innovation that you bring to your career, to parenting, to your art, your science, your sport. Protesting by rote or only following someone’s directions is a design for exhaustion, befuddlement, apathy and in the end, despair. Bring your unique skills, your original ideas, your professional and personal strengths. If you are merely following blindly you’re more likely to do predictable things that have been seen and countered before. Exercise your geniuses for collaboration, articulation, efficiency, boldness, rascality, leadership, strategy, for out-weirding the enemy. Using your living strengths keeps you vibrant and stronger through time.
Protest by rote is design for burnout. And I am by definition anti-burnout, dearest. Like Ragnarok-level anti-burnout. In 97% of cases, you can’t live a design for self-immolation within a long-term mission (justice, tending, health, life…) and still maintain over time that the mission matters to you. It needs you and most often it needs you healthy and in for the long haul.
Choose your mission. Be deeply clear about why and how much it matters. Site yourself beautifully within its defenders. Design for your own resilient action.
And move forward and onward and inward.
Because standing still never existed in the first place.
And the next challenges to what matters are still coming. Protest. Build our world. Resilience is resistance.
I want you to be okay. And to be who you need yourself to be. And then you will be who we all need. This is love, beloved.”
Therefore…
Imagine the result you are building as if it were already in place. Now imagine yourself there and well, benefiting from it and celebrating it and everyone’s work. And if this is true, how did you get here without crashing? What intelligent uses of your skills, your time, your resources did you put in place to avoid achieving success at unnecessary sacrifice?
And now, get very serious about being there, then, in that way. Reverse engineer from that result and put in place the supports within this week that will create support for it, design for it.
This starts today.
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