Bryan Stevenson writes, “Mercy is most empowering, liberating, and transformative when it is directed at the undeserving. The people who haven't earned it, who haven't even sought it, are the most meaningful recipients...”    But who are the undeserving?

On this last day of a year in which real walls of real houses continued to fall to relentless violence, in which truth has struggled to stand, and hate has been proffered with smiles, I know that the storms will continue. I will choose hope. I will not cooperate. I will join those who are holding down the corners

There is something to do. Always, forever and irrefutably: No one can stop me, no repression can keep me from practicing steadiness, curiosity, compassion, accountability, and grace. Nor can I be kept from imagining and longing for a different future.

It is simply impossible to achieve a level of diversity in any organization or other defined system that comes close to reflecting the actual diversity of human experience.  So “getting more diverse” inevitably leads to arbitrary decisions.

 When I ask that question, “Don’t you see?”  I will generally get one answer, No.  The question is hardly worth asking, then, if what I want is for things to change.

Like an endless river of something like light, the human capacity for hope and courage endures. It has always driven liberating change. I’m convinced that it always will.

I’ve learned to not be afraid of grief. It can’t harm me; so I can keep not turning away. And because I’m not turning away, because I am seeing the misery, I can, as theologian and physician Albert Schweitzer is reported to have said, “do something to bring some small portion of misery to an end.”

Curiosity can make a conversation liberatory when it could have been divisive and nasty. But it has to be earnest curiosity

It's almost certain that "they" are as afraid of you as you are of them. That standoff does nothing to hasten the dropping of fists. It does not advance social justice. It does nothing to fend off fascism.

I begin to believe there’s no place for me, as I am, with the life experience I’ve got, in the work of liberatory change. That brings me to a standstill, despairing, frantically looking around for a path. Then someone hands me a stone to lay down, and I take my first step and keep going.

From a place of committed, reasoned compassion, I can pay close attention to those who would do me or others harm. Contempt, on the other, hand leaves no room to consider the other as whole and complex, and there’s little space in that to consider creative, effective response. Contempt requires energy I can’t spare.

Without making sense of the world, it’s hard to know who I am in its context. It’s hard to know what to do in order to thrive. That uncertainty is frightening. But what if the ways I’m making sense of the world no longer serves more thriving and more peace?

It’s tempting to impose righteous solutions in the face of very frightening social and global dynamics. It’s easy to slip into simple certainty in the face of complex uncertainty. It’s easy to want to respond to apparent and real existential threats to cultures, human rights, and lives with repression and even violence. But that will never lead to a world where more people thrive in ever more peace. That’s why I need to guard my fear.

Nothing can stop me from behaving in ways to drive thriving and peace.

It’s dangerous to affirm existential fear. It strengthens the hands of those who manipulate it. Uncovering this nonsense provides an opening.

Because humanity is defined by almost infinite perspectives, I will always be caught off guard by biases I didn’t realize I’d had. Human history is too long and complex for anyone to know all of it, and I cannot know the hurt and tender places in everyone I meet. So, I will inevitably misspeak or act. I will inevitably cause harm. And others will inevitably harm me. . . . And my gosh that’s uncomfortable to know.

There is too much violence and injustice in the world to keep driving people away from movements for thriving and peace.

I don’t know what to say about what’s to be done. In fact, in the face of the complex histories that undergird most if not all of the wars in the world, if I waited on knowing I’d stay stunned and still for a long, long time. But knowing is not all it’s cracked up to be. There are other ways to engage the world.

“We’ll never win” is not a reason to lose hope, or to lose sight of joy, the glorious light in most human beings, or powerful advances in human rights and freedoms. It might not even be all bad.

When responses to horrible trends and events begin to sound like shouts returning across an empty canyon, echoing themselves but changing little, then it’s time to stop shouting and listen.