Action is hope.

This weekend, yesterday, today, I returned to center.

Continuing on the thread of rethinking the doomsday machine we've built, I've begun thinking about the ways to transform the negative emotions and pains that have resurfaced during quarantine. Keeping self and selflessness balanced is a delicate task, and right now the seesaw is motioning from one side to the other. How can I best serve this new world?

My friend Greg shared this interview excerpt on Instagram a few days ago. For the record, I generally do believe in optimism. Nevertheless, this sparked new energy in me.

From The Bradbury Chronicles By Sam Weller:

"I don't believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. That's a different thing. If you behave every day of your life to the top of your genetics, what can you do? Test it. Find out. You don't know—you haven't done it yet. You must live life at the top of your voice! At the top of your lungs shout and listen to the echoes. I learned a lesson years ago. I had some wonderful Swedish meatballs at my mother's table with my dad and my brother and when I finished I pushed back from the table and said, God! That was beautiful. And my brother said, No, it was good. See the difference?
Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you've done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I'll be damned, I did this today. It doesn't matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you'll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I'll be damned, it's been a good year."

And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves.

Where to even begin. I've spent a lot of time trying to process this moment in my journal(s), but I don't know that I have any words of value to offer the world. As of today, I am safe. I am healthy. The same can be said of my family and friends. The people I know of who have been or are sick are still OK and are able to recover from their homes. (*knocks on wood*) The weekends have felt safer—with the quiet and solace found in comforting activities—but the weeks are hard. Dissonance with working at what feels like 2x the pace, three hours longer per day on average, and feeling so disconnected, exhausted and overcome with grief, confusion, uncertainty.

The American Exception Zadie Smith/The New Yorker
"Death has come to America. It was always here, albeit obscured and denied, but now everybody can see it."

'I Become a Person of Suspicion' The Daily
Jiayang Fan of The New Yorker reflects on being an Asian American in this country. It was really affecting—she speaks of her experiences and memories so eloquently and thoughtfully, even when they're painful.

6 Lives Stolen On New York City's 2 Deadliest Days Somini Sengupta & Andrea Salcedo/NY Times
So much care was given to this beautifully written tribute. They honored lives that may have otherwise been overlooked and they have my infinite respect for that.

The pandemic is a portal Arundhati Roy/The Financial Times
"What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world. Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it."

I also realize that I was a long way, still, from finding my voice.

Becoming
By Michelle Obama

I read and listened to Becoming over Thanksgiving weekend in fall 2018. It was the first Thanksgiving I spent alone (and did so willingly). I had just returned from Peru, Houston and I was craving the alone time, plus I'd spend the long Christmas break with my family in a few weeks.

It was strange times because I'd also felt a lump in my breast that week and spent much of that weekend imagining the worst, so I fluctuated between feeling panic about that and comfort from Michelle's tales. (A week later, doctors confirmed it was a benign cyst.)

I alternated between listening (and loved hearing it in Michelle's voice) and reading, unintentionally deciding to read the more poignant parts: her emotional tribute to her late friend Suzanne, describing her father's love—felt a pang in my heart, meeting Barack Obama for the first time. I sat in silence with those stories and felt their impact more profoundly.

Here are my notes sitting in drafts of best observations/takeaways/lessons:

• vulnerability is everything; & I appreciated that she shared hers
• the power of telling your own story & 
• recalling all of the sights and sounds of your life—she was so good at this
• learn your self-worth & hold onto it
• know yourself before partnership
• children are so valuable and so is making them feel seen
• therapy works and is necessary! especially with a partner
• forget checking all of your boxes in life

I've felt quiet since the beginning of the year, struggling to use my voice in a meaningful way. I've a lot going on. I recognize when I'm less confident because words escape my mouth like whispers and my sentences taper off. I'm grappling with how to express what's inside while often feeling like an outsider. I feel this extra after a trip to the Dominican Republic where I experienced more discomfort and disconnection (and growth?) than I expected. This rings true:

"Everyone seemed to fit in, except for me. I look back on the discomfort of that moment now and recognize the more universal challenge of squaring who you are with where you come from and where you want to go. I also realize that I was a long way, still, from finding my voice."(p. 41)

At the same time, I know the feeling is fleeting and, one day, like Michelle, I'll reflect on this time with similar wisdom.

Here I'd also like to show love to two memoirs I read recently. I don't have excerpts but they are wonderful.

Malala Yousafzai's I am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up For Education and Was Shot

• I expected to read Malala's life story and be impressed. What I didn't expect:
• To learn her father was the intrinsic piece; her devotion to education came from his example—& his bravery in educating children, including girls in face of the Taliban; he is a hero & his love for her is enduring and likely was her saving grace.
• Her homesickness to affect me so deeply. It's the primary thing I remember from her memoir. She wants desperately to return to her beautiful home and can't.

Trevor Noah's Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

• I was in awe of his ability to reflect on all of his experiences—big, small, traumatic, enlightening—growing up in post-apartheid South Africa with humor, wisdom, forgiveness, and acceptance. At the young age of 36!
• I listened to this via Audible the whole way through and, swoon. Love his voice.

You work, and you work, and you work, and then you get a glimmer of understanding.

© Illustration by Ana Galvan for The New Yorker

The Myth and Magic of Generating New Ideas

By Dan Rockmore

"The origin stories of big ideas, whether in math or any other field, generally highlight the eureka moments. You can’t really blame the storytellers. It’s not so exciting to read “and then she studied some more.” But this arduous, mundane work is a key part of the process; without it, the story is just a myth. There’s no way to skip the worrying phase. You work, and you work, and you work, and then you get a glimmer of understanding."

There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
By Bryan Stevenson

Thankful for Bryan Stevenson's social justice work and for his documenting so much of his experience in this moving memoir.

I had recently finished Just Mercy when news was spreading of the young woman fatally stabbed in Morningside Park by three teenagers—at least one as young as 13—and felt devastated for them all. The victim and the offenders. This passage illuminates why.

"It took a while for me to sort it out, but I realized something sitting there while Jimmy Dill was being killed at Holman prison. After working for more than twenty-five years, I understood that I don't do what I do because it's required or necessary or important. I don't do it because I have no choice.

I do what I do because I'm broken, too.

My years of struggling against inequality, abusive power, poverty, oppression, and injustice had finally revealed something to me about myself. Being close to suffering, death, executions, and cruel punishments didn't just illuminate the brokenness of others; in a moment of anguish and heartbreak, it also exposed my own brokenness. You can't effectively fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness, oppression or injustice and not be broken by it.
We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. I desperately wanted mercy for Jimmy Dill and would have done anything to create justice for him, but I couldn't pretend that his struggle was disconnected from my own. The ways in which I have been hurt—and have hurt others—are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering. But our shared brokenness connected us.
Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world's sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: "We are bodies of broken bones." I guess I'd always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.
We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and as a result, deny our own humanity.

I thought of the guards strapping Jimmy Dill to the gurney that very hour. I thought of the people who would cheer his death and see it as some kind of victory. I realized they were broken people, too, even if they would never admit it. So many of us have become afraid and angry. We've become so fearful and vengeful that we've thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and weak—not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken. I thought of the victims of violent crime and the survivors of murdered loved ones, and how we've pressured them to recycle their pain and anguish and give it back to the offenders we prosecute. I thought of the many ways we've legalized vengeful and cruel punishment, how we've allowed our victimization to justify the victimization of others. We've submitted to harsh instinct to crush those among us whose brokenness is most visible.
But simply punishing the broken —walking away from them or hiding them from sight—only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity."
(pp. 288-90)

Look to the real that you yourself live. The kinds of tales found there can never come from books.

Women Who Run With the Wolves
By Clarissa Pinkola Estés

This book is a gift. Have I said that already? It's not a coincidence this found its way to me, this year of all years.

2020: the year I tell my stories.

Last words.

"I tell people to do their own mining of stories from their own lives, and insist upon it with those I teach, especially the stories from their own heritages, for if at the least, one turns always to the tales directly from the translators of Grimms, for instance, then the tales of their personal heritage—as soon as their old ones die of—shall be lost to them forever. I am a strong supporter of those who bring back the stories of their heritages, preserving them, saving them from death by neglect. Of course, it is the old people who are the bones of the entire healing and spiritual structures everywhere on the face of the earth.
Look to your people, your life. It is not by accident that this advice is the same among great healers and great writers as well. Look to the real that you yourself live. The kinds of tales found there can never come from books. They come from eyewitness accounts.
The authentic mining of stories from one's own life and the lives of one's own people, and the modern world as it relates to one's own life as well, means that there will be discomfort and trials. You know you are on the right path if you have experienced these: the scraped knuckles, the sleeping on cold ground—not once, but over and over again—the groping in the dark, the walking in circles in the night, the bone-chilling revelations, and the hair-raising adventures on the way—these are worth everything. There must be a little, and in many cases, a good deal of blood spilled on every story, on every aspect of your own life, if it is to carry the numen, if a person is to carry a true medicine.
I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories from your life—your life—not someone else's life—water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom. That is the work. That is the only work."
(p. 511)

Whatever the secret is, we understand that it is now part of our work for life.

Women Who Run With the Wolves
By Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Battle Scars: Membership in the Scar Clan

"In small and confidential groups of women, I bring about this exchange by asking the women to gather together and to bring photographs of their mothers, aunts, sisters, mates, grandmothers, and other women who are significant to them. We line up all the pictures. Some are cracked, some peeling, some damaged by water or coffee cup rings; some have been torn in two and taped back together; some are wrapped in glassine tissue. Many have beautiful archaic writing on the back saying "Oh, you kid!" or "Love forever" or "This is me with Joe at Atlantic City" or "Here I am with my groovy roommate" or "These are the girls from the factory."
I suggest each woman begin by saying "These are the women of my bloodline" or "These are the women from whom I inherited." Women look at these pictures of their female family and friends, and with a deep compassion, begin to tell the stories and secrets of each as they know them: the big joy, the big hurt, the big travail, the big triumph in each woman's life. Throughout the time we spend together, there are many moments when we can go no further, for many, many tears lift many, many boats out of dry dock and off we all sail away together for a while."
(p. 414)

"Whatever the secret is, we understand that it is now part of our work for life. Redemption heals a once-open wound. But there will be a scar nevertheless. With changes of weather the scar can and will ache again. That is the nature of a true grief."
(p. 415)

La Selva Subterranea: Initiation in the Underground Forest

"There are times in a woman's life when she cries and cries and cries, and even though she has the succor and support of her loved ones, still and yet she cries. Something in this crying keeps the predator away, keeps away unhealthy desire or gain that will ruin her. Tears are part of the mending of rips in the psyche where energy has leaked and leaked away. The matter is serious, but the worst does not occur—our light is not stolen—for tears make us conscious. There is no chance to go back to sleep when one is weeping. Whatever sleep comes then is only rest for the physical body.
Sometimes a woman says, "I am sick of crying, I am tired of it, I want it to stop." But it is her soul that is making tears, and they are her protection. So she must keep on till the time of need is over. Some women marvel at all the water their bodies can produce when they weep. This will not last forever, only till the soul is done with its wise expression."
(p. 437)