This Is Where the Work Begins
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Grace Olmstead’s outstanding monthly newsletter, Granola, a favorite of Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn and other staffers. It’s republished here with grateful permission. We encourage you to subscribe to Granola, follow Olmstead on Twitter, and then listen to our podcast interview with her from last fall.
In The Fellowship of the Ring, hobbits Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee urge the wise and powerful Galadriel to take the Ring of Sauron from them.
“I wish you’d take [the] Ring,” Sam says. “You’d put things to rights. … You’d make some folk pay for their dirty work.”
Galadriel replies, “I would. That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas!”
Galadriel’s words are rare, humble—and, to at least some modern people, displeasing. As Richard Beck writes for his blog, Experimental Theology, most of us would seek to use what power or influence we might have to try and “make things ‘right.’”
“Anyone with power, of any sort, tries to use it make the world come out right,” Beck says. “And we would, I'm sure. But alas, it wouldn't stop at that.”
His words remind me of Charles Marohn’s excellent considerations of the importance of “incrementalism” for Strong Towns. So often, Chuck writes, our world sets its sights on “large, transformative projects”: we seek to fix what’s wrong in one fell swoop. We may not have the “one Ring,” but with enough money and support, any mega-project seems possible—perhaps even ethically necessary.
In contrast, Chuck suggests that “Incrementalism takes humility. … In a complex world with fewer and fewer constraints on our actions, the most dangerous people are those who think they know the right answer.”
It has been a year of huge, daunting challenges and pains. Because it’s an election year, it is also quickly going to become a time of colossal promises: assurances that a “fix” is just around the corner, easily assured by the political candidate of one’s choice.
Personally, I have inwardly battled and fretted this year over countless worries—over our political and cultural state as a nation, the pervasive power of social media, anger and estrangement in our social spheres, atrocities and injustices both past and present, the plight of the poor and sick, and more. It’s generally evident that there is no easy fix in these arenas. Somehow, however, I find myself frustrated and angered by that truth—as if, in a year that was not 2020, we would be able to lean on the possibility of some uncomplicated, immediate solution. There would be some easy fix, “One Ring” answer to all this nastiness and brokenness.
“[The] ‘perfect,’ easy fix is never just that. An immodest solution rarely leads to the happy ending we envision.”
But the truth Galadriel points us to is that the “perfect,” easy fix is never just that. An immodest solution rarely leads to the happy ending we envision. Rather, the work we face is supposed to be messy, fraught, and nuanced. It is supposed to require faithfulness, persistence, and love.
Beyond urban planning and the built environment, I think this principle is often evident in discussions about climate change and planetary stewardship, which so often draws its discussants both to large mega-solutions and to despair. What is the perfect answer? How do we repair what’s broken? Perhaps, Wendell Berry suggests, there is no quick-fix solution—the only real answer will come quietly, through the sorts of people who are “hobbits” in the eyes of our world.
“The real work of planet-saving will be small, humble, and humbling, and (insofar as it involves love) pleasing and rewarding,” Berry writes in his essay “Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse.” “Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous.” The problem we face in fighting environmental degradation may not actually be greed, he suggests, but rather “the modern hankering after glamour”:
“A lot of our smartest, most concerned people want to come up with a big solution to a big problem. I don’t think that planet-saving, if we take it seriously, can furnish employment to many such people. When I think of the kind of worker the job requires, I think of Dorothy Day (if one can think of Dorothy Day herself, separate from the publicity that came as a result of her rarity), a person willing to go down and down into the daunting, humbling, almost hopeless local presence of the problem—to face the great problem one small life at a time.
This is the work, ultimately, that Frodo is called to: a “little way” of countless thirsty steps, leading down and down into the dark of Mordor. The destruction of the Ring will require the greatest courage imaginable: but it is a quiet, persistent courage, never allowed to indulge in dramatic heroics, constantly submitting itself to the singular quietness of its purpose.
R.S. Thomas and Mildred Eldridge at Tallarn Vicarage 1940. Image Credit: The Parish of Hanmer and Tallarn Green
In a beautiful essay for Plough Magazine, Jeffrey Bilbro considers the work and legacy of the poet and Anglican priest R.S. Thomas, who lived and worked in the small rural parishes of Wales.
“Thomas admired the Welsh peasants because they served humbly and faithfully in a marginal place, far from the centers of power and technology—and he modeled his own efforts on their example,” Bilbro writes. In some of his poems, Thomas considers a Welsh peasant figure named Iago Prytherch, who “endured the many wars of empire; he didn’t fight, he just spent the days growing food, doing his work":
With no medals to be won,
You were on the old side of life,
Helping it in through the dark door
Of earth and beast, quietly repairing
The rents of history with your hands.
“Perhaps the backwards nobodies from nowhere are, in fact, somebodies, particularly when they look for ways to quietly repair the rents of history with their hands,” Bilbro writes. “These are the true patriots, the people who faithfully love their small corner of the world.”
There’s so much that seems rent and broken at present. We want to put things right. Perhaps one of the greatest challenges of 2020—this “unprecedented” year—will lie in its challenge to commit ourselves to unglamorous, everyday works of courage: to “go down and down into the daunting, humbling, almost hopeless local presence of the problem.”
There will be no immediate rewards, no promise of glamor or applause. But this is where the work begins. Perhaps it is also where the work will find its completion.
Cover image via Mitchell Kmetz on Unsplash
About the Author
Gracy Olmstead is a writer whose work has appeared in The American Conservative, New York Times, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She was a 2015 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow and is currently writing a book about the Idaho farming community where she grew up. You can connect with her on Twitter and Instagram.
Rik Adamski is the founder of a planning firm that strives to help cities create thriving places by drawing on the wisdom of the past. He joins this episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution to discuss his approach to planning and the challenges of implementing a new planning approach in cities.