The emergency wins every time.
The newspaper, social media, dinner time conversation, the principal’s office, sportscasters, the weather, the boardroom–the conversation is almost always about the emergency of the moment. The thing that’s happening all at once.
We have a volunteer fire department in town, but we don’t oten have a volunteer corps dedicated to long-term culture change. Even typing that out seems odd.
But the chronic problems define our future, and the persistent changes over time brought us to where we are. Evolution of species is a chronic process. And most of us die from chronic illnesses.
What would it take for us to spend even a fraction of our time and energy and attention on the chronic instead of the urgent? Drip by drip.