Saturday Memory for August 29, 2026
Many years ago, I was having breakfast with Sir Laurens van der Post in Santa Monica. At one point during our long conversation, I asked him what was the most important thing he learned in the Kalahari. Without hesitation, he said: “The power of the small.” I asked him to elaborate. He then told me that if he was focused on seeing the lion, he would most likely get eaten. But if he focused on the bugs on the ground, the breeze, moving the reeds, the sounds in the air, the changing color of atmosphere, then he would know when the lion was near, though could not yet be seen. That had saved his life many times.
As I was remembering this, I wondered how we might apply this idea to the biggest things coming at us: climate change and AI. I wondered, if we focus on these big things only, do we neglect taking in the small.
So what are the small things we need to notice?
For my two cents, we need to notice and resist the drifting into a listless state of defeat. Everything can change if most people motivate themselves to do small acts of kindness, resume their relationship to a collective common sense, and remember that a small number of people can change the world. I offer this poem by William Carlos Williams as a warning for all of us.
Thursday by William Carlos Williams
I have had my dream—like others—
and it has come to nothing, so that
I remain now carelessly
with feet planted on the ground
and look up at the sky—
feeling my clothes about me,
the weight of my body in my shoes,
the rim of my hat, air passing in and out
at my nose—and decide to dream no more.
Well, well, well.
The power of the small has always been my way. Maybe we could call it intuition. That would be right on the mark.
When things get to big, you miss the component parts. The I Ching instructs that there is a time for great things, but, this ain’t one of those times. AI is big. It misses the giggling intuitions that are just over one’s shoulder. It is there, if we follow the crumbs that the psyche reveals itself. Follow.
We might want to listen to the children, whose sharply rising rates of anxiety, depression, suicide, and extreme violence say volumes about how they perceive their world, their futures. And it is not so much a result of clinical categorizations as it is a sign of how deeply they do care.
We might also pay more attention and listen more closely to the silence of a world losing at least 3 species per hour (30,000 per year). Gone forever. 3 per hour. All while the chatter of a roomful of movers and shakers in Milan for the COP26 Climate Conference heard a teenager address them with “Build back better, blah, blah, blah. Green economy, blah, blah, blah. Net zero by 2050, blah, blah, blah” (Greta Thunberg). Blah, blah, blah . . . childspeak for calling BS. Childspeak to Cronus. Listen to the children.