It was my turn. I woke up in the middle of the night with chills and in the morning tested positive for COVID last July. My first time. It had taken over four years for this virus, this global pandemic, to enter my body. Luckily, my body was faithful to me as I tried to be faithful to it. I took the supplements, cut the dairy, slept and slept and slept, pushed liquids, cancelled meetings. But I plagued by the thought: “Shouldn’t I be “better” by now?”
Do you hear my assumption in that? Surely recovery should be linear, right?! Surely if I “follow the guidelines”, there’s a good outcome guaranteed, right? Surely, I’ll be back to normal soon…won’t I?
What is it about humans (me) who longs so desperately for stability? For something that feels solid, secure, fixed, known, when we know that nothing is?
“All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
is Change.
God
is Change.”
– Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (the story of which began on 20 July 2024)
Through tears of frustration, I realized that I was mourning a romantic, even a childish notion of stability. It’s a notion that is shaped by privilege, and having “enough” to even imagine a release from effort or strain, to believe one can achieve “a good life.” It’s a notion that is shaped by patriarchy and capitalism as well – the idea that once I partnered up and got a house, life would be steady, anchored. After storms hit our neighborhood, after my partner’s mother got pneumonia…we thought we had had enough “events” this summer. Then COVID.
This idea of changelessness is such a lie. After I dried my tears, I was reminded that the same structures rooted in oppressive systems that supposedly deliver more predictability and efficiency, also serve the consolidation of power in the hands of the few.
Even knowing that, humans long for regularity. We try to do many things to create security, consistency, and reliability in our lives. And despite our best efforts, none of it is guaranteed.
So with ongoing televised genocides, the climate crisis, the empire’s distracting political theater masking the facist policies already being put in place at local levels, there is little chance anything can remain the same these days.
When faced with this reality, all it signals is that it’s time to return to what I can control, which is limited by the awareness I have of myself and what I can manage in terms of language, emotion, and body. In times of upheaval and evil rhetoric, let me start with myself first, going deeper, and interrogating my own motivations and fears and dominant culture ways of being, so that I can remain focused on the actual day-to-day practice of dismantling systems of oppression.
Leadership is often about trusting what we cannot see or understand and releasing what we cannot control.
I believe one of the keys to enacting change at this time is empathizing with our own and also other people’s desire to “know” or predict or control what often is unknowable. Understanding where/how fear of risk/failure/uncertainty shows up for myself – as impatience, as planfulness, as adherence to rules – I have to offer compassionate presence to those parts of myself first. And the only way to “steady” that I understand is re-upping on the practices that create more spaciousness for my own rootedness, self-reflexivity, and resiliency.
If the space for emergent solutions and the need for control or certainty continues to operate in an inverse relationship in our sector, we can start by honoring what we can control as individuals amidst multiple, intersecting challenges in a rapidly changing world:
- Our breathing
- Who we follow/read/listen to
- Our response to new information
- How we interpret setbacks
- Who we surround ourselves with
- How we treat others around us
- What we put in our bodies
- Our sleep routine
- How we speak to ourselves
- Our level of honesty
- How we spend our time
- Where we direct our attention
- What goals we go after
- What we say yes and no to
- How soon you we try again after we fail
- When we ask for help
- Our rituals
- Our work for the world
- What we create together, right now, in this next moment
I keep thinking about this: Maybe, we can discover together that uncertainty is not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe our role as civil society leaders at this time is to honor uncertainty, to protect the space for something else to happen.
What happens if we are willing to to stop resisting change? What happens when we put our intellectual reasoning and perfect planning aside? What happens when we recommit, over and over and over again to the STEADFASTNESS, TRUST, FLEXIBILITY, AND PATIENCE needed to enact change…together.
So I ask you, and especially myself: What is your next small, beautiful step – the step under your control – towards a future world worth living for?
***
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