A friend and I helped another postpartum friend with chores related to new motherhood. While cleaning the house, organizing the baby’s space and helping with the car seat, we quietly absorbed our friend’s new cadence and flows. We saw how laboriously she walked, climbed stairs and bent after a caesarean section. Nether of us have children and this was the closest postpartum view I ever had. We wrapped up as evening came and as we walked out to our cars, my co-helper friend commented on how the hastily-parked rental bike outside the building was blocking stroller and wheelchair access. How quickly she had created a bridge to what our friend would need from her environment as a new mother! It was the most organic and kind realization.
Diversity and inclusion conversations often come attached with strong emotions and fear; and they can be perceived as tools of righteous reckoning and moral anger. Could we instead think of diversity as life’s best sonar? No matter how well-meaning, empathetic or brilliant we may be, it’s simply impossible for any of us to have all potential life experiences. It’s these lived experiences that allow us to understand something from the deep crevices of its insides; they create a clarity of thought and language that helps translate ideas into meaningful actions. Without this hands-on knowledge we often grasp things superficially, lacking vital details around the aches, needs and dreams of those we seek to serve. Creating space for diverse experiences and voices helps us deep-dive into life.
In a complicated world, diversity is a formidable environmental scanner and compass. It’s a precursor to path-building.
A sustainable world: “I call the transformed world toward which we can move ‘sustainable,’ by which I mean a great deal more than a world that merely sustains itself unchanged. I mean a world that evolves, as life on earth has evolved for three billion years, toward ever greater diversity, elegance, beauty, self-awareness, interrelationship, and spiritual realization.” ― Donella Meadows
