Staying locked into an image of how things are supposed to be can blind us to the grace of what is. Elaine Orabona Foster
Constantly focusing on the limitations, instead of all the possibilities, is how people become stuck in their lives. It only serves to recreate the same old reality from day to day. And soon the days turn into years, and lifetimes. Anthon St. Maarten
If you feel stuck, move. You’re not a tree. Germany Kent
There is pain in staying the same and there is pain in changing. Pick the one that moves you forward. Lee Rose & Kathleen McGhee-Anderson
The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs. John Dewey
Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive. Edith Wharton
Everyone to whom much is given, of them will much be required. Luke 12: 48
There have been several times in my life when I have gotten myself in the kind of trouble that could have (and in some instances probably should have) put my life on an unwelcome trajectory.
On such event occurred many years ago on a particularly lonely road in Wyoming. I don’t even recall why I was there but having come to the end of the line and proceeding to turn around, I ended up in a ditch, one that it would have been easy enough to avoid had I not been fussing over an unanticipated detour rather than concentrating as I should have in finding my way around it.
On this particular cold night, at the end of a line with no lights but the stars, the gravity of the situation was pressing in. But true to form in a life punctuated by careless ruts and abundant responders, the property owner came home in his massive pickup truck, saw my plight and yanked me out of the ditch, shaking his head all the while.
Like many folks, I never seem to learn my lessons in real time, only after life has baked in what should well have been obvious at earlier stages – that ruts can and should be recognized and avoided, and that those who help us most directly to overcome ourselves and our limitations are not always obvious. Sometimes they are the equivalent of a stranger with a big heart and a bigger pickup on a road he owned and on which I was, in essence, a trespasser.
This is a nice little lesson, I suppose, but it is more than that. None of us affiliated with Global Action is exactly living in a “rut-free zone.” Indeed, such ruts proliferate in our lives and livelihoods like weeds in unmanaged lawns. Our personal life, the offices and organizations that demand our time and talents, the national and multilateral institutions which presume to be leading us out of the ditches we have clumsily backed ourselves into, all suffer to one degree or another from playing the same tune, over and over, because we’ve forgotten that what is familiar in a time of multiple crises, may sooth our frayed psyches a bit but is not nearly as impactful with regard to rut removal as we might wish for it to be.
As we at Global Action take our own step back to reconsider the value we hopefully add now and the value we could add going forward – the ruts we have acceded to and, perhaps more importantly, the skills needed still to extricate ourselves from whatever ditches we have inadvertently fallen into – we recognize that our primary institutional “cover” has its own issues. Two events at the UN this week highlighted both its still-considerable institutional promise and the ruts we have collectively stumbled into which tend to suppress the flourishing of that promise.
The first of these was a Security Council meeting hosted by Kenya on Women, Peace and Security. It has been 21 years since the original adoption of Resolution 1325, and while some decent progress has been made regarding women’s inclusion in the security sector and in peace processes, while some good work has been done in crafting “action plans” to implement core resolution provisions at national level, we continue to struggle with resolution implementation, hardly the deepest ditch we at the UN need to climb out of. As Ecuador joined us and others in wondering, what exactly are the obstacles here? Do we really want or need another 21 years of SG reports and high-level events? Is it simply, as an Irish Minister claimed, that we have yet to discern the right people to empower, the right voices to raise? Do UN member states really need to be reminded of the talents that women already bring to security sector functions? Do they really need to be reminded of the responsibility to protect women’s rights defenders (or any other defenders for that matter) or that entertaining the testimony of women’s groups is not at all the same thing as heeding their recommendations? After hours of (too) much solidarity talk and self-congratulations, this agenda is still sticking up out of a policy ditch, maybe not one as deep as before, but still formidable, still apparently beyond our collective skill set, let alone our collective will, to fully extricate.
And then there was the discussion hosted by the UN Peacebuilding Commission with the Secretary-General, a discussion focused on the peacebuilding implications of the SG’s recently-released “Our Common Agenda.” During this discussion, there was much appropriate attention to conflict prevention and, as noted by Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, on the need “to move beyond narrow peace and security lenses to address all relevant security threats,” this consistent with the SG’s call for delegations to invest in discerning “what peace now means in this world.” Fair enough. But as the UK Ambassador reminded the rest of us, this is all easier said than done as we do not yet possess the right tools, the right “architecture” to move our full, lofty and expanding peacebuilding agenda from aspiration to tangible progress. It is clear from our own long engagement with the Peacebuilding Commission just how many remarkable people worlwide are doing the good work, are helping build more sustainable communities and, by extension, ensuring the very futures of their neighbors. Is Our Common Agenda fit for their purpose? My best guess is that we will need more diverse contributions and more robust tools to make it so.
I want to use what remains of this space to honor some of the world’s unsung champions, the many women and men who cross our paths at those pivotal moments and rescue us – at least temporarily – from the practical and policy ditches from which we so often seem unable to free ourselves. But also, closer to our home, I also want to honor those diplomats, NGOs and others who understand and communicate that our largely-avoidable ruts of policy and practice are needlessly threatening our future every bit as much as weapons and emissions; and that part of our “troublesome work” now is both to tell bold and fresh truths, and to recognize that those now excluded from policy spaces might have the solutions we badly need to reassure anxious and even traumatized populations that long-sought relief is finally at hand.
Shifting back to that lonely Wyoming road, what I required on that cold night (and surely didn’t deserve) from the man in the truck was more than his “solidarity,” more than his “sympathy” for my plight. At that moment, I needed his sturdy bumper, his powerful engine and his formidable skill in maneuvering both. And that is precisely what he provided. The lesson here is that the trails we have converted into ruts, the ditches we have backed ourselves into during these often-traumatic times, these too require skills we don’t always know we need supplied in part by people we don’t yet properly recognize, let alone honor.
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