Small acts of love, beauty, the spoken word and kindness become trim tabs for change
Violence. Violare – to treat with outrage, to dishonour
Impact – to strike forcefully against something.
We speak of impacting communities. Impact investing. Making an impact. Inadvertently, seeded in our language is an act of violence.
We might choose a better word to describe that which we intend to enable.
Otto Scharmer has suggested 3 forms of violence.
Direct– physical brutality, emotional projection.
Structural– lack of access to, often sustained over decades or centuries and perpetrated by no single person.
And Attention Violence – when we are not seen, reduced to numbers, and diminished by others and ourselves.
In this age of becoming aware of privilege, access (lack of), inequality, systems designed to do exactly what we now have…as we turn to create a more beautiful world that we know is possible, choosing language that has within it the seeds of what we intend is significant.
Small acts of love, beauty, the spoken word and kindness become trim tabs for change. Rather than impact we might enhance, enable, synergise…
We might not be violent directly. But do we say yes to structural violence because it serves us? And have we diminished others and ourselves in the way we co-ordinate people in enterprise that never allows the whole person to be seen, heard, and acknowledged for their intrinsic value.
This is the hard work of change. One word spoken creates a field effect, a precession. To consider to this level of granularity is to understand the whole.
Photo taken July 4th, 2020