The Institute for Liberatory Innovation

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Imperfect and Necessary Practice

Lucinda Garthwaite

-Lucinda J. Garthwaite, ILI Director

I’m thinking today about practice, which is, as I understand it, specific behavior repeated with informed intention for a particular kind of change. The intention I hold for social change is a less violent and more socially equitable world. My personal practice proceeds from there.

It’s easy to start a reflection on practice with the famous admonition to “be the change you wish to see in the world.” I used to see this on bumper stickers a lot; now it shows up in internet memes. When it is attributed at all, it is attributed to Indian lawyer and nonviolent activist Mohandas K. Gandhi.

Actually though, Gandhi never wrote or said this. Here’s what he actually wrote,

"If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man [sic] changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do." *


Hold on to that. Here’s another thing about Gandhi: he was in his youth an unapologetic racist, though he is widely seen as renouncing that position later, even by many accounts becoming a staunch anti-racism advocate. And an anti-sexism advocate, though he tested his own sexual restraint by sleeping naked with a young niece – arguably a gender and power insensitive decision, at best.

In a 2019 National Public Radio piece on the occasion of Gandhi’s birthday, Lauren Frayer reported that, “many black Africans are calling Gandhi a racist. #MeToo activists are questioning his sexual practices.” Frayer also reminded readers of Gandhi’s friend and colleague, and India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru’s plea to “keep [Gandhi] human . . . Gandhiji was a great man but he had his weaknesses, his moods and his failings. . . .Gandhiji was much too human and complex to be [a god].”

Mohandas Gandhi was not perfect; that is clear. It’s also clear that his life was defined by a personal practice directly linked to the change he wished to see. So practice does not, as conventional wisdom goes, make perfect.

There’s good reason to suspect claims of perfection, especially as it’s become clear to many that belief in perfection is one of the underpinnings of systemic oppression and supremacy of all kinds. So practice in the interest of perfection is actually antithetical to the change that I seek.

Practice doesn’t make perfect, but it can make...better. Systems science holds that when part of a system changes, the system itself always shifts. That’s as much the case with forest ecology as it is with human systems, which are made mostly of interactions and relationships. So the ways we behave with one another, when undertaken repeatedly with intention, can yield small and large shifts in the systems of which we are part.

Gandhi wrote, “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.” Change, though, is just that - change. It’s not perfection; it’s not even an imperfect end point. It’s a direction. I have no illusions that my practice or anyone else’s will result in the end of all violence and a perfectly equitable world. Still, I try to align my practice with change in that direction.

The reason liberation requires practice, though, is that we are human and therefore vulnerable to all sorts of moral blunders. Great icons of social change are no exception and neither, certainly, am I. Ask some of my current and former colleagues and friends. Ask my stepchildren. Ask my siblings. Ask my life partner. I fail often. When I do there is nothing for it but humility, self-investigation, accountability, and returning to the work of living my intention.

That is the nature of practice, after all. The fundamental discipline of practice is returning over and over again to intention. Successful practice is evidenced by failure and increase; one step back as essential as the two steps forward.

I have often heard people say, in light of the news of the world, “We can’t all be activists. I don’t know what to do.” Intentional practice offers a path from that discouraged place; relationship by relationship, interaction by interaction, each person can make change, even if only in small ways.

When I’m stalled by not knowing my place in creating the change I seek, returning to practice lifts my spirits. Then - a small miracle - I often find I can do more. Perhaps this is what Gandhi meant when he wrote of, “a mystery supreme. . . . A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness.”