We aren’t going to change the system. We can’t. The very idea that we can change the system is what keeps it intact. It feeds the illusion that we stand outside it, looking down like engineers or gods, swapping one system for another. But that separation is false. We are not outside. We are the system.
Energy and matter are the same thing. Matter is what happens when energy intensifies, folds, and condenses. For over 13.8 billion years, those intensities have layered into sediments, each one the trace of something.
For school it’s: the steam engine, the industrial revolution, religion, conquest, language, social class, the sun, flowers, air, and everything else.
All of it sediments together. And over time, those sediments are compressed, by culture, by interaction, by history, all at once, into what feels like a solid block.
That’s what we call the system.
But the system isn’t one thing. It’s the compression of infinite things.
We mistake the block for a single monolith we can push, fix, replace. But we’re inside it. We are made of the same sediments. We can’t step out and move it. We can only move within it.
Yet compression always creates cracks. Those cracks are where life happens. Where movement is still possible.
Resistance lives in the cracks, in the small spaces where we can breathe, stretch, and scrape at the walls. Acts of resistance are erosions from within. Each scrape, each act of friction, dislodges a fragment. And maybe those fragments will settle somewhere else, form new compressions.
But erosion matters because every crack, every loosened grain, is life insisting on more room; it is a refusal to suffocate.
We don’t change the system from above. We erode it from within, through our participation.
So the questions become:
How will you choose to move, to participate with the cracks? What acts of erosion are you already performing, knowingly or not?
In schools, it might look like:
🥥 Breaking down the myth of the teacher as authority;
🥥 Including young people in every decision that shapes them;
🥥 Refusing to rank students by grades;
🥥 Valuing every subject equally, every way of knowing as life-worthy;
🥥 Including the natural world as a participant in every decision.
These are not reforms, which only re-form the cracks into solidity. They are acts of friction. Small erosions that remind us: participation is not neutrality. It can be resistance.
We can find the cracks and learn to move differently within them. We are the compression and the movement all at once and more.
The system won’t change because we want it to. But we can erode it one act of friction at a time.
Coconut Thinking 