What Blackberries Teach About Being Human

Rebecca Solnit once stood in a creek for hours, picking blackberries until her hands were scratched and stained purple, until the quiet had soaked into her. The jam she made was runny and seedy, but she gave it anyway — not as product but as process, as summer itself. Now Silicon Valley tells us to skip the wading, the scratches, the slow ripening of attention. We can order berries online, let AI judge their ripeness, outsource even our love letters and grief. But what we’re abandoning isn’t inefficiency — it’s the work of forging a self. As one bookstore clerk lamented, “People under 30 don’t make eye contact.” We resist the tyranny of the quantifiable by naming what gets lost: the embodied animal joy of holding and being held, the resilience built through unmediated contact, the subtle wealth of giving as well as receiving. Ease, it turns out, can be corrosive.

Be The Change

Today, deliberately choose the slower path in one interaction: speak your order to a person instead of tapping a screen, write a thank-you note by hand, or simply hold someone’s gaze long enough to really see them. Notice what the friction gives you.

Mysterious ‘Hero’ Dog Leads Police Straight to Missing 3-year-old Officer Says in Body Cam Video

A police officer hooked his own instincts up to those of a local dog to find a missing 3-year-old in Kentucky in early January. Officer Josh Thompson was canvassing the street near the boy’s house with another officer when a dog started walking with them. After Thompson said “let’s go find this kid,” the dog spun around and started trotting back in the direction they had come from, barking periodically to say “hurry up.” Returning to the back of the house, the dog ran to a parked car, where the boy was locked inside with the child locks on. After coaching him on how to open the door, the boy “jumped out of the car, bear hugged my neck and wouldn’t let go,” said Thompson. He doesn’t know where the dog came from (neither does the department nor CBS) “but it was a blessing from God that day.”

Be The Change

Today, notice when your first instinct is to be wary or to keep moving past something unexpected-a stray animal, an unfamiliar person, an interruption to your plan. Like Officer Thompson, who paused to follow a barking dog when he could have dismissed it, practice trusting that small tug of intuition that says “pay attention here.” Let yourself be led off-script just once, even if it feels inefficient or uncertain, and see what you might discover when you merge your heart and mind in the moment.

What the Glitter Couldn’t Give Me

When Rudy Karsan sold his company for over a billion dollars, he took a picture of the check, called the banker, and felt nothing. The elation never arrived. Instead, he cried every night for three weeks — the longest he had ever wept. What followed was a radical unraveling: he sold the Ferrari, threw away fifty trophies, moved with three boxes and his clothes. The man who had gone bankrupt three times chasing what he calls “glitter” discovered something unexpected in the emptiness. “The pathway to joy, for me, turned out to be three words: I don’t know,” he writes. Each time he says it, a warm feeling opens — he becomes a child again, curious, undefended. Now he asks every entrepreneur about their perception of death before investing. Joy, he’s learned, is the only currency you can’t bank. You’ve got to earn it every day.

Be The Change

Today, practice saying “I don’t know” when someone asks you something — not as evasion, but as genuine curiosity. Notice what opens inside you when you release the need to have the answer.

The Last Newspaper Hawker in Paris

Ali Akbar, the voice of Paris’ 6th arrondissement, is believed to be the last newspaper hawker in Paris. For more than 50 years, he has made the rounds on his secondhand bicycle. Last month, an old customer — French President Emmanuel Macron — named him a knight in the National Order of Merit, one of France’s highest honors. At 73, Akbar still works seven days a week, 10 hours a day, although now he’s lucky to make about 60 euros – about $70 – a day. Born in Pakistan, the oldest of 10 children, he grew up in poverty but dreamed of building his mom a house. After he wound up in Paris in 1973, an Argentinian friend suggested selling newspapers in the Latin Quarter. Eventually he built his mother her house, and he and his wife, Aziza, raised five sons in Paris. In his neighborhood, people say Akbar has given them something priceless — a chance for daily human connection. “He’s interested in you, and then you’re interested in him,” says a longtime customer. “And this is very rare now in the big cities.”

Be The Change

Do your work in a way that builds community.
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Brooklyn’s Bridgekeeper: the Trash Crusader

The Brooklyn Bridge is an iconic landmark in New York City that attracts millions of visitors. “Recently, the landmark has been repeatedly defaced with trash, hair ties, receipts, napkins, and locks attached to its fences.” Ellen Baum grew tired of seeing it so defaced, and devotes a few hours each day to removing the trash. When asked why people trash it, Ellen believes it is a trend among tourists. “…they don’t live here, so for them it only means doing it once for the likes” then they leave. For Ellen, “It’s an extension of my home. I’m on it every day. I don’t own a fence, but if I were living in the suburbs, I wouldn’t allow someone to put trash like that on my own fence.” She posts her efforts on social media, and has plans to host a monthly volunteer meet-up to help keep it beautiful.

Be The Change

Realize your role as co-creator and co-owner in efforts to keep your community clean and beautiful.

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When the Farm Becomes the Town Square

Imagine inverting the medieval village: instead of fields radiating outward from a walled center, homes encircle a working farm. These “agrihoods” are sprouting across California, placing food production — not parking lots — at the heart of community life. They promise resilience in a warming world: capturing rainwater, cooling scorching pavement, feeding neighbors with arugula harvested within the month. As one designer notes, agrihoods offer “active open space that actually generates commerce” — bridging the developer’s need to build and the community’s hunger for green. Yet the vision requires more than romance. Water systems, crop selection, storage, staffing — all must be resolved before the first seed goes in the ground. When done well, though, these farms don’t just grow tomatoes. They cultivate a different way of living together.

Be The Change

Find a community garden or urban farm near you and spend an hour there this week — not just observing, but asking what it needs. Water? Weeding? An extra pair of hands at harvest? Notice how the act of tending shared ground shifts something in you.

Reviving the Art of Research

While Duke University professor Aaron Dinin is teaching entrepreneurship, he actually teaches young people to have a healthier relationship with failure through various oddball challenges— from solving a 1000-piece puzzle in six minutes to trying to beat a nine-year-old at selling cookies. Dinin’s students recently were tasked with answering as many obscure questions as possible using nothing but the books in their library. Students were given a printed-out catalog of books to help them find the answers to questions like “When was Kentucky founded?” and “What makes Pickett’s Charge important?” Many admitted this was the first time they had ever looked something like this up in a book. Dinin pointed out that as anyone these days would almost certainly just Google this kind of information, “being able to answer questions isn’t nearly as valuable in the modern world as knowing which questions are worth chasing in the first place.” Dinin’s inspiration to create learning such opportunities was “watching brilliant students sabotage their futures because they were scared to be wrong.” To combat that, he decided to design classes that “make failure survivable (and maybe even a little bit fun).”

Be The Change

Organize a phone-free day with friends or family and dive into a local library, discovering answers the old-fashioned way.