I’ve felt all the feelings in the last week: so many feelings, that sometimes I’ve felt like a great big burning crucible of emotion. This has been scary. It’s also been interesting, exhausting, scary, galvanising.
I love the word galvanise. I hardly ever hear people using it, and I suspect it might be considered quite old fashioned now. Technically it means the process of applying a protective zinc coating to steel or iron to prevent it rusting. Right now, I feel like I could do with a protect coating of something, although I’m not sure zinc would help.
Galvanising also means to shock or excite someone into action; it’s a bit like the idea of “inspiring” something, but with the strength of metal added. I hope that one of the things that might come out of this period in time (and remember, it’s just a little moment, it’s not “THE END”) is that some of us - myself included - might find what’s happened to be galvanising, to inspire us to take action, to do something, to create more change.
I think I’d made a mistake in thinking that a single person, a leader, a government, might be the answer to so many of the problems we see around us all the time, but this moment reminds me that change and action has to come from community and individuals, as much as from power structures. No single person is going to save us - and no single person is going to destroy us, either.
