a few ways to start small
today's hope ray, via ugly photo
Now, look. I’m writing to you in twenty minutes I’m stealing from my paid work so I can send you this truly awful photo.
It’s not exactly because I think my words or my photo or the sticker1 I put on a post are so urgent or important. Not on their own, they’re not. Not on my own, I’m not.
I just know that some days we’re in charge of resisting our own hopelessness, and some days we need someone else to give us our daily hope. I just wanted you to know, again, that someone is doing something.
I want you to know it matters if you start small. I want you to know there are a million creative ways to do more than wait for a hero who's not coming. Scratch that. A million heroes are coming and you are one of them.
We are going to keep our pride and our hope because we are going to keep taking action. Sometimes we'll be 7 months pregnant and kind of scared to put a sticker on the Costco buggy barn. But we'll do it anyway, because courage is never just one thing and if they want one single thing from us, it is to hide behind our screens and our cynicism and forget our power.
Maybe this email barely counts as “doing something.” Maybe this sticker doesn't represent power. But you seeing this sticker and us being connected by it does.
That's the whole secret. We have just as much power as we choose to claim, as long as we find a way to claim it together. Remember what Grace Lee Boggs said? “The real engine of change is never ‘critical mass';’ dramatic and systemic change always begins with ‘critical connections.’”
This is what it means, at least in the beginning, at least when your society has lost the art of community, to create critical connections. We just keep reaching out, any way we can. It’s awkward and maybe even goofy. Be goofy. Humility will take us farther than we ever believed.
People are out here already, in all our awkwardness and goofiness and earnestness and mistakes and gorgeousness. Get out here. If it's "just" by minorly vandalizing an already ugly place, welcome!!!!!
The sticker on the buggy barn matters because we are getting tired. At least in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s local Costco we are. We are getting inured to the violence and stupidity and fearmongering and fear.
We need to see each other’s hope rays. We need the signs of life, connection, and persistence to be just as pervasive as the signs of dysfunction and disaster.
It’s okay to get tired. I am seven months pregnant and a little bit depressed. I am the tiredest.
Here is what I’ve learned about tiredness from many years of chronic and mental illness: it’s a balance. You have to rest. But you also have to walk outside in the sun (or the clouds or the rain), even if you can only make it down the block and back. You have to. You remind your body that you are here and you are making choices and you are going to preserve and grow what little strength you have, any way you can.
We become what we do. Become a vandal, become an artist, become a teacher, become a rabble rouser, become a servant, become a pilgrim, become a problem solver, become a problem. Become anything but what the tech dystopians and hate-mongers want you to be, which is a quaking blob staring into the void of your phone.
Now, look. I’m out of time. This is not one of those three-week essays I have to get on an airplane to write. This is just a note. This is just a hand reaching out. This is just a moment to say, stop chasing the feeling that you’re “doing something” that has to qualify by being big or original or special or smart. That feeling is maybe not going to happen. Believing in that feeling is keeping you stuck.
Don’t do something. Become a critical connection. Reach out to someone, or everyone.
Five ideas for sticking out a hand, more or less at random:
Make art (or order stickers) and put it up around your town.
Write a song for your reps and post a TikTok of yourself calling their offices to sing it to them.
What do you need from a community right now? Email a few people and ask if they want to meet up and help each other with that thing.
- Maybe you meet at a park, everyone calls their reps, and then you go for a walk/lunch/cupcake.
- Maybe you’re already employed or volunteering in a resistance effort, but you could use a spiritual reading/support or silent meditation group.
- Maybe you make a group project out of the daunting task of “getting involved locally.” Attend different orgs’ meetings and compare notes, go to actions together, or offer your services jointly as a marketing/face-painting/data-crunching collective (whatever the group is good at!).Look for a new way (or an old way) to pray. Connect with God before you connect with Twitter in the mornings. Resist becoming a cloud of anxious thoughts. Ask God/Love/Higher Power how to become a presence of love to others throughout your day.
Find your own language for what’s going on and how you’re feeling about it, and start using it more. Look at it as an experiment and embrace the awkwardness. What’s impacting you, today? What actions around you are giving you hope? Use these words to talk to your friends and family and maybe even strangers in a way that less politically-engaged people can relate to, or that points your despairing likeminded friends in a more productive direction.
A couple of my nonreligious family members joined a Unitarian Universalist church after the election. Join a group, even if it’s not the perfect group that represents your exact interests or whatever. Connection and community is a discipline.
Bring bubbles, kazoos, a dog, a baby, Jolly Ranchers, homemade buttons, stickers, or temporary tattoos to a protest. Use them as conversation starters. Tell people you’re not sure what to do next, but you’re starting with joy. Exchange numbers or social profiles to expand your local network.
Whatever you become, may you become a hope ray.
Courtesy of Garrett Bucks of The White Pages!
This was lovely. Thank you. It feels good to not be alone!
Beautiful! Thank you for such a thoughtful, useful post. I really needed it to hear this today!