Comforts for this Moment
Wherever this moment finds you, know you are not alone. I'd love to throw a log on the fire, bring you a mug of something warm, sit across the soft couch and hear how it is to be you right now. But since I can't, I will offer this.
If you are sitting in grief, despair, anger, take comfort: it is evidence of how much you care. We do not have strong feelings over things we don't care about. And care is the primary engine of any worthwhile change. As designer Debbie Millman says, "Expect anything worthwhile to take a while."
Ours will not be an overnight victory. Nor will it be one victory. We descend from many, many small victories that snowball into big public triumphs, too often mistaken for sudden success. Hospice took 10 years of failed bills before it got federal funding. Marriage equality, civil rights, the end of South African apartheid: the fights worth fighting take many hands across many seasons.
So what is our work in this moment? I have a few ideas, and they are only that: one fellow human's ideas.
Resist immediate action; learn what uncertainty has to teach us. This is a season of hot takes, circular firing squads, hasty explanations for how this happened. It's human to want answers; with answers, we can take action and get ourselves out of this painful mess.
But people believe, behave, and vote for wide-ranging and complex reasons. The dust likely needs to settle before the meaningful insight necessary for meaningful action makes itself known. As Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, "No mud, no lotus."
"Connect, Only Connect." I love that line from Howard's End. Uncertainty is a very fine moment to put down anything with an on/off switch - "Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in" advises Wendell Berry - and be with each other. We are not meant to hold the hard stuff alone.
Here Come the Poets. I'm tempted to think my way through this moment. But if thinking were all it took, we'd likely not be where we are. A professor I had once said, Now's the time to feel our way through. And the poets are masterful at that. I've been spending a lot of time with the great Kentucky poet-farmer Wendell Berry, whose poem "Real Work" always finds me when I need it most.
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
We do these things because of all the work we are called to, protecting our care from hardening into cynicism is top of the list. We will need that care to power the change waiting to be made on the other side of election dust settling.
And no matter what, know that your efforts, your care were not in vain. As Václav Havel wrote from prison, "Hope is an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed."