'Let's Keep Working Our Corners'
It is difficult to process the news right now. The Russian invasion of Ukraine continues to intensify—a senseless geopolitical aggression from a bygone era, happening before our eyes in real time. As this horror unfolds, it magnifies the many troubling current events, which altogether seem to signify the erosion of modern peace and progress.
The pandemic—two years in—is now a quiet but constant threat to public heath. Powerful world leaders, when not invading free countries, seem to lie to the public with impunity. Inflation, fuel prices and widespread worker shortages are causing the cost of living to skyrocket and global wealth inequality to widen. As white nationalist movements gain steam around the world, disrupted seasonal patterns and extreme weather events signal the ever-worsening climate crisis. These compounding hazards make for intense anxiety, which people bear day-to-day with common feelings of fatigue and despondency.
What is one person to do, to counter the dark tide of these times?
Ursula Wolfe-Rocca—a teacher from Portland, Oregon—recently offered a brightening and empowering thought in response to this universal worry and doubt. From her Twitter feed, 23 February 2022:
She added:
‘Let’s keep working our corners.’ An inspiring, collective call to action—and one that suggests, with an encouraging ‘keep’, that many people are already ‘working’ for good in their own ways, without realising it.
And Wolfe-Rocca’s analogy is apt. The imagined dark fabric we need to unravel calls of us, in ‘our corners’ of the world, to take stock of what we are doing to work towards the light—and keep doing it.
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