Kay:
Hello there, Questers, and a welcome back. We have such a fantastic quest guide for you today. I’m so excited to get into this quote. It is Wednesday, November 24th, episode 473, 11.24 on Wednesday does mean that this is Thanksgiving Eve. Hurray! Love the official kickoff to the holidays and cannot wait for the lovely season ahead. Now, our superstar today bringing you the quote is Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Shi:
Yo, RBG in the house. May she RIP. Her quote for you today is, “Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.” Now, you are likely familiar with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the RBG. But just in case you need a little bit of a refresher, she was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1993 until September 2020. She was a women’s rights trailblazer, an icon in the feminist movement. Really helped shape policy for almost 30 years. Truly an amazing woman who deserves a lot of respect and whose words carry with it a lot of weight, even if she was tiny.
Kay:
Well, before Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a Justice of the Supreme Court for 27 years, she was a lawyer fighting for women’s rights activists and alongside the women’s rights movement. She cut her teeth, one of her early wins in her career was helping get women — this so tripped me out when I first learned this about Ruth Bader Ginsburg because it doesn’t feel like it’s this recent of history that someone we know alive could have fought for this, but she fought for women to have the right to get their own credit cards and purchase their own houses without the co-signing of a husband.
Now, there is something about that that just was so nuts for me when I first heard about it. But think about the amount of activist work that had to go into Ruth Bader Ginsburg finally being able to champion this forward in court. “Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.” She started her journey in a time when a woman couldn’t even buy a house on her own and ended out with being able to serve on the Supreme Court that legalized gay marriage in the United States and has done some really incredible things. So amazing from somebody who’s literally been on the forefront of change in our country to have such a quote like this.
Shi:
It is crazy that it wasn’t until the seventies that women were able to get credit cards on their own without a man’s signature, same with property purchases and the like. When I was a young girl the seventies seemed so far away, but as I get older and as I watch time pass, and you’ve likely had this experience as well, if you’re listening, you start to realize how recent that history was and how truly close to women’s liberation, racial liberation albeit a work in progress, even our economic liberation. There’s been so much humanity change in recent history, and yet all of us who were born in the last 50 years are born in a world that looks vastly different than any other world than anybody else has ever grown up in, but we don’t know that it’s that different.
So, taking this lens and looking back historically, I think it’s really important. It helps us see like the trailblazers, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who she is, see how hard she worked. How long it took and learn from her path and from her wisdom what it takes to accomplish something that seems impossible that other people fight against and that can at times look insurmountable. She tells us here that real change happens one step at a time, and you know what, from someone like that, I’m inclined to believe her.
Kay:
Well. I mean, when we think about change, maybe take it out of the macro and bring it into the micro. Think about change for yourself. Have you ever taken on an endeavor where you’ve looked to maybe change the number on the scale or change a destructive thinking pattern or change something in your life? Chances are you went through with going forward for that change and found out that journey maybe looked a little bit different than you had initially anticipated, or maybe it took a little bit longer. If you crash diet and lose 20 pounds in a month, chances are the month after that you’re going to gain all 20 of those pounds back. But if you work hard over lifestyle change and lose 20 pounds over the course of 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 months, that real change is enduring and that’s the kind of change that really happens. Like Ruth Bader Ginsburg tells us. “…one step at a time.”
Shi:
One step at a time can be so painful though. Am I right out there? Especially if you take one step and stop. If you try to complete a one-mile walk taking one step and stopping every time it’s going to take forever. Enduring change happens one step at a time, but it happens when we do it consecutively over and over in a single direction and don’t give up. I think that’s really behind the curtain here, certainly with RBGs past and her history and definitely in this quote here. Kay, with the yo-yo diet that you just mentioned, if we want that real change and enduring change, sure you can sprint the first 400 feet, but then maybe you’re so tired that you can’t make it the rest of that mile if we’re going to keep up with the analogy. But that one step at a time is what will complete the mile and then do it consistently at a pace that works for us in the long term, I think can really set us up to make that change real like RBG tells us here.
Kay:
It makes me want to sing, one step at a time.
Shi:
I knew you were going to sing it.
Kay:
Well, we got to sing the song and we got to quote the quote. So, just a reminder today what RBG, the real RBG, Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, “Real change, enduring change happens one step at a time.”
Shi:
Alright, today, your quest is to take some time to reflect on the so-called failures that actually propelled you further in the direction of your success. Stay committed to your goals and pursue them with determination and courage. Change and success are built one step at a time and upon both past failures and past successes. Are you ready?
Kay:
Let’s quest!
