A drive across the Saskatchewan prairie in May brushes the soul. There’s a peace about it. The lines are straight and unadorned. The horizon unfurls in infinite yawn. Patchwork of crop threads as quilt, springing anew under the sun and bluer blue. The prairie breeze tells the birds to try the easier direction….held static through the windshield.
There’s lightness of being in the simplicity. Peace. Surety. Stability. The big has a way of putting us in our place in our humbling smallness.
Lacking kink in the road, there is time to reflect on the enduring amidst a world heavy with its insistent mis-giving. Wrestling hope from the land’s rhythms has bred tradition here. Values grounded in caring spirit. Strength of moral character. Gritty resolve. Obligation to community. Handshakes and eye contact. Potluck meals and bingo nights that do the social knitting. A nicety not betrayed by rough knots of broader societal strife.
For all the bedrock, for all the known, one can’t help but more viscerally feel the dystopia of unpredictability at the doorstep of the predictable.
The slippery slope is here – in aging infrastructure, larger farms with fewer people, aging population, expensive farmland and equipment costs that makes it very difficult for young people to farm, and technology that sees the occasional tractor already marching to the beat of the driver-less GPS drum.
Sometimes our stickiness with tradition makes us less able to see the world through the prism of change…certainly to connect the dots in a way that comprehensively capitalizes on change. We put up the pickled “history lives here” sign at the entrance to town, invest our energy in presenting our museum to the world, and hope the world interacts with us more nostalgically.
However, the change genie is out of the bottle and it’s not going back in. The more we resist its ways, the more we hold back prospects for the very communities we homesteaded from creative, hard scrabble determination to succeed. This dynamic is the definition of irony.
Perhaps the generational difference is that today, change is accelerating. While we as humans generally accept change as a matter of general osmosis, we are less adaptable to accelerating pace of change. Our brain wants to go back to comforts. What we know is more comfortable that what we don’t know.
So while we appreciate that time can stand still in our souls – in our seeking of the meaning of life in a prairie sky and the bend of wheat to the breeze – we can’t stand still. We have to become more comfortable with the discomfort of the unknown. We need to prepare our communities, and our workforce, for the adaptability that will be required to thrive in the 21st century.
The more things change, the more they can’t stay the same. Let our roots be our soul. But let new ways forward be our guide.