I woke up today to find the world had again taken confident steps along the path clearly labeled "worse".
The last few minutes before I turned off the lights last night were the exact opposite. Small, personal, friendly steps on the bright path stretching out next to the "better" sign.
What I did? Nothing out of the ordinary, I just picked up A pattern language and The timeless way of building from my bedside table and spent a few blissful minutes reading passages in both.
We do not need huge solutions to things.
We just need to practice, gather information, and give a damn.
(That last part often feels particularly lost, but I suspect many of our problems actually are strongly connected with doing way too little of the first.)
It is easy to get swept up into exciting systems thinking reading these books. And so it is always a - yet another - breath of fresh air and ray of sunshine to read the last part of The timeless way of building where it all folds in on itself and disappears because when you have actually internalized things you no longer need the support structures.
Both books are simply the training wheels you need to get to where you actually want to be; where you need none of this to be explicit at all. And most likely not applied exactly as written either.
So many more instructions should end with a chapter like that.