make elections boring again

on being radically practical

I’ve been hit with the kind of desperate exhaustion that chronically ill readers might recognize. The kind that has you absolute triaging every day: takeout and frozen food, bargaining with yourself to take out the trash, calling in the calvary for help with the toddler, and still crawling into bed at 8:15 every night. I’ve been to my medical providers and we know the next right things to do. I cannot emphasize enough how fine I will be—and what an incredible bench of support we have around us, so that even if I were not fine, we would all work together to make it fine.

However, this has all made the upcoming presidential election appear rather fuzzy and far away. At the same time, many people’s profit motive is to convince me that worrying about it is my civic duty. From my hazy spot on the couch, I can’t help noticing how much of the “news” is manufactured, conjecture, hyperbole. And the things that matter to me, like the war in Gaza, aren’t there.

Still, the election feels momentous on so many levels, so I think I should write some great essay that will convince someone to do something (what is the thing? I don’t know) or at least Make Sense of Things for someone (me).

Then I realize I am in truly dire need of a shower and I go do that instead.

I’m being forced to ask: how do I live a creaturely election season?
How do I acknowledge our infinite interconnectedness—as well as my own stark finitude?
How do I wiggle my toes into the dirt and the grass, tune my ears to my neighbors, and ground my thoughts in actions in what is real and true and material and here?
How do I wait upon the Lord when a hurried culture and urgent injustices make it feel as though waiting is a sin?
How do I mother this tiny person and also attend to the world all around us?
How do I take up responsibility for the choices I do have, and let go, let go, let go of all I can’t control?

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Tuesday morning I stood in the most diverse line of people I’ve encountered in Chattanooga in order to shuffle into a nondescript building, fill out a goofy Scantron form¹ and vote.

I stood in the sun next to an elderly Black woman and a young White man in business clothes, and exercised the infinitesimal amount of power available to me. It was boring. It felt almost perfunctory. I looked with grief at all the people around me who maybe don’t really care if my child is safe from guns at school, who maybe don’t experience anger and despair every day about Gaza—the majority of whom, statistically, were actually there to register their vehement disagreement with liberals like me.

I also stood in the sunshine and had my customary moment of wonder and happiness that democracy exists at all, and that all these neighbors and I get a small but real say in the workings of power, and that it represents at least the dream of a society where power is earned through persuasion rather than seized by coercion.

I heard someone walking out the door say, “That felt good!,” and I have no way of knowing who she even voted for, but I think it matters that voting feels good.

I had a little conversation with the poll worker and we chatted and laughed like it was the 1990s when people used to talk to strangers.

And I filled in those dumb little bubbles, convinced like everyone around me that I had the right answers, and then I fed my ballot into the machine and watched the ballot count go from 4,392 to 4,393. And just like so many people I witnessed back when I was an election worker, that number didn’t make me feel insignificant; it made me feel proud. Or maybe more simply, beautifully, it made me feel equal.

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There’s something important about the absolute lack of pageantry involved in voting.² So much of my average day is carefully orchestrated as a consumer experience. It creates a whole cognitive load of its own to sift through the marketing messages and impulse purchases on offer everywhere I go.³

I’m learning to seek out the places that aren’t trying to foist themselves upon me: the 12-step group, the little old church with all its flaws on display, the book recommended to me in old-fashioned conversation. The public school. The voting booth.

I’m a chronically ill mother of a one-year-old. My days are absolutely filled with the kinds of priorities and tasks that no advertising team can make shiny. I cut up fruit. I take my pills. I help a little person totter down the stairs and back up them, over and over again, for fun. I schedule doctor’s appointments and go to them. I call my friends on the days that I most want to hide. I read a book called Farm and here are its contents: “lamb, cow, bucket, sheepdog, tractor, wheat, sheep, egg, hen.”

There are days when, like any sane adult, all this tedium feels intolerable. Dogs and toddlers live by routine. I…do not. No future employer is searching high and low for people with mad diapering skills.⁴

But I’m also—if only out of sheer contrariness—learning to celebrate it all. On the baby’s birthday, I thought back to my introductory psychology class and the truism that the first year of life is the most important. And now it’s done, I thought. For one year I smiled at him and kept him safe.

This work is a whole bunch of nothing from hour to hour, day to day. And it is everything from this decade to the next and the next.

On a creaturely time scale, it’s both a matter of faith and a matter of fact that what is small and unflashy can reshape worlds.

Tuesday I voted for Kamala Harris and today I will send Kamala Harris a postcard that says “CEASEFIRE NOW.” They are small and unflashy and by most logics, futile actions. But I live by the logic of Jesus Christ. I live by the logic of a God who mothers us with faithfulness and care. I am in the middle of proving that what we do when no one is looking or applauding makes all the difference.

To be a creature is to admit and accept complexity, and to start where we are anyhow. I’m full of glee to vote for a Black woman in the White House, and I’m full of sorrow to vote for the continuation of the Biden administration’s policies toward Israel and Palestine.

However flawed the systems we have, however lofty our ideals, this here is what we have to work with. Motherhood will school you in the most exacting practicality, and it will brutally strip away all your patience for ideas that are not plans. I’m still bad at acceptance. I am accepting the power afforded to me in this flawed democracy in this exhilarating and heartbreaking time.

On a creaturely time scale, election season is a short season—and all the factors shaping its outcome have been converging for many years. Frankly, the time to panic was any time before now.

Now is the time to attend to the boring and unglamorous tasks of showing up and taking care. Now is the time to gather our strength, our courage, our serenity and our joy for whatever comes next.

peace, love, bread, and wine,
Lyndsey

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creaturely gathering is Tuesday at 8:15 EST!

If you’re also feeling all the tensions, come and join us. Bring a candle, a match, and a journal. It’s 45 minutes of simplicity and space. You’ll get the Zoom link this weekend.

1. Come on, Tennessee. If South Carolina can do electronic voting, so can we.

2. aside, perhaps, from the all-important “I voted” sticker!

3. Maybe that’s why I’ve recently lost all patience with social media; I need to be able to at least hear myself think inside my own house.

4. although, as every caregiver knows, this is entirely to their detriment.