Ponder. Don’t Panic.

“We are still in the nihilist moment of disillusionment and anger, after people have lost faith in the old stories but before they have embraced a new one. So what next? The first step is to tone down the prophecies of doom and switch from panic mode to bewilderment. Panic is a form of hubris. It comes from the smug feeling that one knows exactly where the world is heading: down.” - Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

We hear it every day, from our parents, from our teachers, and from the pundits on television: the world is decaying and it’s inevitable. True, like we learn in physics, entropy, the state of disorder, always increases or stays the same. Order is hard. Life is hard. Both take a lot of work. And yet, we must remind ourselves how progress is truly made. It’s built piece by piece, by PEOPLE fighting not for glory but for the goal. Did Dr. King lose faith when he saw a society plagued by illogical hate? Did Michael Jordan withdraw from basketball when he was too short to make the varsity team? No, of course not. Bewildered, absolutely. But they went back to the drawing board—in this case back to grass root movements and the courts.

If you surf, skate, or ski, then you already know that your body follows where you are looking. If we keep our heads down and accept a defeatist mentality, then society falls too. But, if we look to the sky and wonder how we can be better, then society will rise, commensurately to how high we look.