One of my current favorite writer/philosophers is Bayo Akomolafe. He has this thing about doors and cracks that has me thinking...
Doors grant access, they are predictable and do not interfere with the logic of the system. Cracks, on the other hand, are unpredictable and can be destabilizing. They are often appear without warning and seem to follow their own logic.
Doors are designed to behave. Cracks are not designed at all. Cracks happen as a release of hidden stress.
Right now, modernity is showing signs of generations of accumulated stress. Cracks are appearing throughout, destabilizing ecologic, social, financial, and political systems. Everyone is scrambling to patch those cracks, but there is another way to see things...
Like weeds in a sidewalk, in those cracks lie the seeds of new possibilities.
I'm starting to think that our path forward is to find the cracks and intentionally nestle into them and grow something unexpected and unplanned, something possibly better.
A friend of mine reminded me that Leonard Cohen already thought of this in his song Anthem:
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
Maybe it's in these growing cracks where we can think and act to transform the current global instability into something closer to how we want the world to be?