I keep learning that things I once took for granted as true deserve closer inspection. My example for the day is an adage: "A watched pot never boils."
The truth is, when you watch it closely, you learn how complex and beautiful a boil can be.
I love imagining the atoms colliding in high-speed crashes as dancing swirls form in the water’s depths. You can get lost in the wonder of watching a pot boil and all its implications.
If we can watch the pot boil, it means we can pay attention and learn in the process. Walking away and returning to a rolling boil means we miss the simmer.
As you observe a pot of water heating, you start to notice tiny bubbles forming at the bottom, floating up and creating wild shadows and eddies. You see steam rise, thickening before it dissipates into clear air.
I love imagining the atoms colliding in high-speed crashes as dancing swirls form in the water’s depths. You can get lost in the wonder of watching a pot boil and all its implications.
If we can watch the pot boil, it means we can pay attention and learn in the process. Walking away and returning to a rolling boil means we miss the simmer.
Sometimes, we think we can hide away and simply wait for the outcome. But the real magic and work happen in the simmering—in the first bubbles forming and the chaotic waves that follow.
People think of the 60s as the Civil Rights Movement. That’s because it was the decade when the movement finally came to a full boil. But it took decades of people watching the pot and slowly creating a climate that turned up the heat.
If people hadn’t been watching the pot and adding fuel in the 40s and 50s, there never would have been the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The brave men and women started like a simple pot of water, with streaming pearls of change, until the next generation could tend to the raging turmoil that eventually bubbled up.
With everything happening in the world on so many fronts, the word I hear exchanged among friends at parties or in grocery lines is that people feel the need to walk away.
“It’s too hard to take the news.”
“I can’t even figure out where to focus.”
“I feel so much anxiety.”
“I can’t even figure out where to focus.”
“I feel so much anxiety.”
I just want to put a word out there: don't pull the plug.
This is a time to tend the embers of justice work so that it can be rekindled and boil over down the road. This heating up may be short-lived, or it may be a slow boil, but our job is to keep watching the pot and adding our tiny piece of fuel to keep it going.
This is a time to tend the embers of justice work so that it can be rekindled and boil over down the road. This heating up may be short-lived, or it may be a slow boil, but our job is to keep watching the pot and adding our tiny piece of fuel to keep it going.
Watching a pot boil is a meditation. It is slow and beautiful.
-- Becca Stevens