Structure and Change

Sometimes, I have idly thought about what I would do if I were president. I think the last time I thought about this much, I decided I would run on a platform of keeping everything the same, except making high-expected-value changes aimed at a long-term payoff. For instance, investing in programs to seed civil society, or mental health education and training in public schools (and/or teaching young people how to deal with life and not just numbers and words), and probably other things I can't remember now.

Here we see a duality of "structure" and "change". The numerous possibly somewhat misguided or even maybe corrupt government tendencies and programs are the "structure" which keeps things the same and helps keep them from falling apart. Then, whatever creative things I want to do to make things better in the long-term, are the "change" that one would hope would make my hypothetical presidency worth it -- going beyond the mean.

I think about churches, and how sometimes they are good at finding people to fill the role of "structure", but in some cases, they don't find people who are oriented toward change. "Change" in a church is not just "congregational vision" where the church tries to do things that look kind of like when businesses or nations try to change, or what activists are going for when they protest, but rather also disciple-making -- encouraging, promoting, modeling-for-imitation, etc. holiness, -- which is change in the individual's life.

People in an individual's life can be structure, change, or perhaps a mixture of the two.

--

There is a connection between creativity and "change", and between technical proficiency and "structure". You can be technically proficient and lack inspiration, and also you can work for structure without inspiration. But (generally, or even always) when you work for change and creativity, you need inspiration to be successful, or even to attempt to do anything. So it might be useful for those who pursue change to pursue creativity, so that through creativity, they can get connected to inspiration. Or, to ask God for a spirit, for the same purpose.