el Día de los Muertos

As regular readers of Zeitgeist know, we do like to see innovative ways of confronting a challenge. Challenges take many forms and of course the scale of the challenge is relative. But perhaps this month we have come across an approach that may be hard to match and it relates to perhaps one of the biggest challenges for humans – the fact that we die.
For some though perhaps this challenge is viewed as just another inconvenience which can be legislated away. Let us explain. The mayor of a town in southern Italy has banned dying.
Giulio Cesare Fava passed the law earlier this month because Falciano del Massico, near Naples, has run out of burial space. Clearly this is inconvenient, but they have plans to develop another burial ground but in the meantime the law has been passed to prevent citizens from shaking off this mortal coil……
As we ponder this weird and rather whacky approach, we can certainly relate to certain politicians and officials, past and present, who think, or have thought, that they were in fact omnipotent and not constrained at all by reality. For the rest of us however there are certainly many constraints and restrictions on what we can or cannot practically deliver.
We are reminded of a quote from Brendan Venter, the former South African international rugby player and Premiership Rugby coach who is also a doctor. He said that from his medical training he learned that “Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much you know, how committed you are, how much work you put in. Sometimes there are variables that you can’t predict. Medicine taught me to accept that there are some things I can’t change”.
The balance then is to still apply creativity, innovation and relentlessness to delivering change while at the same time being pragmatic in recognizing that not everything can be changed. Picking the battles that you choose to fight is critical and making appropriate trade-offs will lead to success.
Unfortunately two of the residents within days of the passing of the new law are now in serious trouble for failing to wait for the new burial space by inconveniently passing away. It is still unclear what the penalty will be for these two unfortunate elderly citizens who failed to comply with this new regulation but their flagrant disregard for the law surely cannot go unpunished…….