Point A to Point C

Something I've been thinking about a little lately is about how it's actually not always the best thing, to try and live in a way that corresponds in what you think the world should be like.

What I mean is that often times I (we?) try to imagine things as they should be and try to be the change we wish to see -- and by that I mean we try to act in a way that's more in accordance to what things would be like if the world were already changed.

The problem is that sometimes in order to get from point A to point C, you need to get out of a local maxima and go through a point B that looks radically different than point C, or is even in the opposite direction.  You can't always just forge ahead a straight path to what you want.  And in certain cases, you find that point C isn't even really =possible= to get to from point A.  So you really need to search for that "point B".

This first came up while I was thinking about incarceration and policing institutions, about how I think a lot of people may (?) have a hard time thinking about the structure of law enforcement because I think they are imagining this "point C" in which there is a law enforcement structure that actually does all of the right things (whatever you believe that may be).  I don't really know whether this mythical point C exists, but I think there's a pretty compelling argument that the line from point A (where we are today) to point C doesn't exist, or at least is certainly not a straight line.

But it applies (perhaps more practically) to my own behavior as well.  In Social Dance we had 90% (or whatever, I'm sure the number is way different from scene to scene) of people learning only the dance role traditionally ascribed to their gender.  In a perfect world we wouldn't even have gendered dance roles, but that's just not the world we live in right now, so the question becomes how do we find ways to push the needle towards point C despite the fact that we're far away from that.

I have certain beliefs about the way I interact with people as well, where I would like to live in a world where people can express certain things more freely than they are today.  I think I've perhaps tended to be a little more loose with that kind of thing in the past.  But if there is all this cultural and societal baggage from everything that has led up until this point, maybe acting in the "ideal scenario" way isn't actually the best way to be.  There's a reason we can't live in a perfect world (yet?) and that reason is important to both understand and respect as we search for a way that we can improve things (or at least, make attempts at trying things out in a different way).

I've been feeling pretty crappy about myself lately so it is really tempting to put a huge disclaimer on this all like "I am stupid ignore whatever I am saying" but screw it.  I'm feeling better today anyways.