The Kresge Foundation reposted this
I am increasingly hearing – in the media and from friends and colleagues – faint undertones suggesting that rather than permitting despair to consume us, we need to see in the swirl of confusion and chaos an opportunity for renewal. It’s so very hard to carry that kind of optimism as our public systems are subjected to pressures they simply aren’t equipped to withstand. Those pressures will either drive those systems to collapse or – if their residual strength is sufficient– to fundamental regeneration. We can only hope that it is the latter. The author Maria Popova, from whom I’ve borrowed before, draws an analogy to chemistry: "This chaos of particles that liquefies solids and vaporizes liquids is just the creative force by which the new order of a more stable structure finds itself. The world would not exist without these discomposing transitions, during which everything seems to be falling apart and entropy seems to have the last word. And yet here it is, solid beneath our living feet — feet that carry value systems, systems of sanity, just as vulnerable to the upheavals of phase transition yet just as resilient, saved too by the irrepressible creative force that makes order, makes beauty, makes a new and stronger structure of possibility out of the chaos of such times."