Circles of Action

-Lucinda Garthwaite, ILI Director

I was invited to a small gathering this week for tea and good conversation, though two of the women there refrained from tea because they were fasting for Ramadan. One of them needed to leave the gathering early; it was time to break the fast at her home in Qatar.

This was of course a virtual gathering, hosted by Catalyst 2030, a global network of social entrepreneurs of which I’ve just become a member. We joined the meeting from nine different countries; I was the only one in the U.S. Others were in South America, East Asia, India, Europe, and the Middle East.

The hour began with an inspiring, ten-minute talk offered by Dr. Rana Dajani, a molecular biologist and professor at Hashemite University in Jordan, and an advocate for global women’s rights.*  The conversation that ensued was remarkable in many ways, not least this:  At the end of it, almost to a person, we said some version of, “Thank you, all.  You changed me today.”

While everyone on the call is committed to social change, I doubt that anyone came with activist intentions for the call itself. Yet, without our knowing it would, that video-gathering became a circle of action.

Action in any part of a system perturbs the system to change. Intentional action can perturb a system to change in intended ways. Small actions in carefully chosen parts of a system, often called leverage points, can provoke large, systemic shifts. These understandings form the foundation of systems practice, whether undertaken by activists, advocates, organizational leaders, or consultants.

But not everyone has access to the power that comes with recognized leadership, certainly not everyone is a consultant, and for many, activism and advocacy are out of reach. 

Such was the case, it would seem, for Austrian psychiatrist Victor Frankl, when he and his family were imprisoned in German concentration camps during World War II. Frankl’s father, mother, brother, and wife did not survive.  Frankl lived to write about his experience in the bestselling, Man’s Search for Meaning, in which he offered this insight, “Everything can be taken from a man [sic] but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

South African freedom fighter and President, Nelson Mandela echoed Frankl when he wrote in Long Walk to Freedom that he and his comrades in prison, "drew strength and sustenance from the knowledge that we were part of a greater humanity than our jailers could claim." During his 28-year imprisonment, much of it brutal, Mandela also famously insisted on treating his jailors with respect for their full humanity, writing later that “To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”  By their own report, some of his guards changed their political views as a result of Mandela’s behavior toward them, some even helped smuggle his writings to the outside world.

Mandela found a circle of action sleeping in a six-by-six cell at night and laboring by hand in a hot quarry by day, Frankl in the brutal conditions of German concentration camps as his loved ones and friends died around him. As a result, by their descriptions, the systems that imprisoned them shifted: slivers of thriving where there had been none, small diminutions in violence, a few particular liberations.

Bless the activists, absolutely. I am grateful to the organizers, the earnest elected, the risk-taking radicals who push at the edges to make room for more people and the planet to thrive.  And theirs is not the only way to perturb a system to change.

If I sink into believing the only path to change is to be that kind of activist, then I risk missing opportunities to do what I can in my own circles of action.

 “Everything can be taken from (a person) but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”  

As much as it pains me to say it sometimes, I am a part of the systems that both heal and plague the world. My actions in those systems, even small ones, can perturb them to change.

With few exceptions, no one is powerless; everyone has a circle of action. The only question is how to use it.