How do you change a country?

Firstly, it has to begin in the mirror. What am i doing to make a difference? How am i spending my time, money, skills and energy and using my things to help make my small space one that builds and grows and inspires and assists?

The key though is asking the question. Or questions.

Big furore happens over Woolworths using some lady’s design for their baby-carrying bags. Within four comments i had read on the situation i had probably changed my mind four times [which is okay – if extra information doesn’t cause us to change our minds we may be doing it wrong!] but what reading all the different responses and comments did for me was help me form some helpful questions.

Is Woolworths in the wrong? Is this a once-off occurrence? Should I boycott Woolworths [or call others to cos I rarely shop there]? Was there an apology? Was it genuine and heartfelt? Is this any different from other companies doing the same thing? 

And so on. For me it is not so much as important that we all arrive at the same endpoint. But it is crucial that we ask the question or questions and really try to understand what is going on, both at an immediate level but also at a systems and structures level as well. 

Here is a helpful example:

On Facebook yesterday, i posted a shocking picture taken in a North West school that showed all the white kids sitting happily together on an 18-seater table in the middle of the class and the four black kids in the class at the edge of the room on their own table.

i posted the picture with shock and horror and people responded in a number of ways:

One of those was a white woman who was so tired of the generalisations made against white people when clearly it is not all white people who are like that and do i want her to DM me the good things she is doing that proves that she is not.

Another comment came from my friend Megan Furniss:

Here is a good tip. Ask yourself before posting anything what you are so outraged/offended by. Ask yourself what you would feel if you were the parent of the black child, already completely outnumbered by white children in a school in a country where white people are only 8.9% of the population.

When we stop to ask questions, we do our best to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, we create spaces and opportunity for empathy, we ask what the deeper issues are and where are there structural and systemic things in place that are leading to the symptoms that we are being shaken by.

One response is ‘I’m tired of hearing about this because it makes me feel uncomfortable’, while the more helpful response to me is, ‘How can I really hear and see how uncomfortable your lived experience of this is?’ Only one of those are going to move us closer to healing the country.

When we were in Oakland, one of the things we learned from our bossman, Darin Petersen, was to ask better questions.

In fact, my life had been transformed more than a decade previously when at the singles tables at friend’s weddings i moved from asking, “What do you do?” to “What are you passionate about?” which really helped my small talk conversationalism [which i hate, who cares what people do?] to go a lot deeper and revolutionised interactions with people.

So, as Megan suggested above, when you read something on social media that makes you angry or defensive or feel like you need to react more than respond, take a moment to ask yourself, “What is really going on here?” “What is happening inside of me?” “Why am I feeling this way?” “Is there some kind of truth in here that might be uncomfortable for me to recognise or admit to?” And so on.

If we all start asking the questions, and really seeking the honest answers to them, this country will start moving in a much better direction.