We don’t make change

“We don’t make change. Change is happening anyway.”

When I heard these words from Arawana Hayashi my body perked up. She said them in such a casual way, like this was so obvious it was barely worth mentioning, but for me they were like seeing a tulip in the garden in January. Very notable.

I live in a place where being a “changemaker” is an identity and maybe even a movement; it’s a place that is actively cultivating a community of changemakers. So if we can’t make change then what is this all about? I couldn’t stop thinking about Arawana’s statement for the next 24 hours, so the next day, I asked her to elaborate.

[Ashoka claims to have coined the word “changemaker” in 1981. This term is all over their website, including in their “Everyone a Changemaker” framework.]

Arawana Hayashi is the creator of a practice called Social Presencing Theater (SPT) and I am currently in a year long immersion with her and Manish Srivastava to become an SPT practitioner - ultimately so I can work with changemakers to see and understand the systems we inhabit in new ways.

And now, the term changemaker has me puzzling over what we think we are doing, if we (obviously) can’t make change.

[The quotes that follow are from the notes I took when Arawana answered my question. Everything I write here are my interpretations and understanding in progress, an attempt to play with this idea and see where it leads me, and not to accurately represent Arawana’s views. I may not fully understand what Arawana was trying to say; this is my best understanding as a humble student. ]

Arawana began her answer to my question with a pause and a breath. Then she said that what is coming next is already present within what is happening today.

There is something already present right now that is longing to be expressed and mobilized. It has “a yearning for life and for freedom.” And when we really learn to listen we can start to notice it.

We can start to notice the seeds of the future that are present in the current reality. (Although common enough word sequences, seeds of the future and current reality are core phrases in SPT and Theory U, the larger framework which SPT is nested within.) And those seeds are what we attend to.

She said, we can’t take something that is a certain way and turn it into a differnt thing. Or we can’t “change it into what it isn’t.” To me this means that what is here now and what is coming are the same thing. The samara becomes the maple, the acorn the oak; an acorn will never become a maple tree. The towering tree is not a new thing from the tiny seed. The tree is already inside the seed, it simply needs to be given the conditions for growth.

This makes me wonder about all of the change efforst that do not result in much. In these cases, are we focusing on areas that are not ready to change? That do not yet have the potential to transform? Are we trying to make something happen that doesn’t yet have the imprint of the future within it, so therefore it cannot grow? Are we imposing our will onto a system that has its own life and longing? Willing a tree to emerge from barren soil?

Arawana beieves that “the system has a yearning to reach it’s fullest capacity” and what we are here to do is “allow what is there to come out.” And we don’t do that by trying to change and tinker all the time.

We do that through non-doing and listening. To tuning in with precision and wide-field awareness. We wait and notice. We listen to the present with as much attention and curiosity and bravery as we can for “what is naturally coming forth.”

Social Presencing Theater is a collection of tools to assist in this listening. We learn to listen with our whole selves to whatever system we are attending to: the condition of the individual, what occurs between and around two people, the behaviours of small groups and organizations, or the environment maintaining and influencing large social systems.

And then when the timing is right, we must be there and have the courage to do what might not be comfortable in service of what is emerging, of what the future is calling us to do.

The practices of SPT are one way to tune into this yearning.