Make It Work, People

The commuter train system in Japan is known for its accurate schedules and efficiency, despite transporting about 21 million people daily with more than 12,000 trains running.  In reality, its infrastructure is considered so overtaxed that logistically the system should not work at all.  But it does brilliantly, in spite of disruptions.  Trains arrive on schedule every two minutes.  Its success, however, is not based on perfection, but the opposite.  To make this system work, a recent article in The University of Chicago magazine reports that “unpredictability must be a part of the transit equation.”

It is the recognition of that unpredictability, the acknowledgement that the system is not perfect, that actually allows the Japanese train system to work so well and so efficiently.

How do the Japanese engineers do it?  By “…creating an environment where technology incorporates irregularity rather than trying to eliminate it,” according to Chicago anthropologist Michael Fisch in his book about the Japanese commuter train network. 

I think about how much energy, effort, and frustration that we invest in trying to make our lives at work or at home “perfect,” as if that is an attainable goal.  What if we approached difficult situations not from a perspective of perfection, but from the lack of it? 

There will be difficulties.  Count on it.  We live in a fallen world, not a perfect one. So as Fisch says, incorporate the reality that there WILL be problems rather than trying to pretend that they either do not exist or hope beyond hope that everything will go smoothly THIS time.  The trick is having a system within the system so that glitches are expected and already accounted for.  As I have told many young moms, “From now on, flexibility is your middle name.”

Ask God to help you see these road blocks and variables, not as obstacles but as opportunities in disguise.  Make it work with what you have before you.  The biggest problem may be that we have stopped trying to do just that. 

And I will lead the blind

in a way that they know not,

in paths that they have not known

I will guide them.

I will turn the darkness before them into light,

the rough places into level ground.

These are the things I will do,

and I will not forsake them.

                         Isaiah 42. 16-17