Choosing Stones
ILI Director Lucinda J. Garthwaite
For many who I know, read and listen to, the past year especially has been a time of critical transition, an opportunity to reckon and change in ways long overdue. With that awareness comes a hunger for information and understanding. It’s an urgent hunger, with often anxious questions, because the stakes are so high and there is so much to learn: What do I need to know right now? If I miss a development on some critical action front, am I not paying enough attention? Is my privilege/bias/ prejudice/discomfort keeping me from seeing what I need to see?
I've been talking with friends and colleagues about this recently. I’ve begun to see that this anxious urge to gather a perfect collection of understanding distracts me from the whole point of learning, which is to be changed -- and to apply my changing self in the service of ever more equity, justice, kindness, and peace.
Three stories came to mind this week to remind me of this:
I visited the Grand Canyon only once, long enough ago that my camera was full of film. I remember that I felt a sort of panic there, which I soothed only a little by taking picture after picture of the Canyon. I think I went through three rolls of film. I knew I was standing on the edge of Awesome. I thought I needed to take that with me, so, I took what I could with the camera. I have none of those photographs left today. I have no details to report to you, only, vaguely, that there were stripes and colors on the canyon walls.
Almost thirty years later, though, I remember well the feeling I had just before the panic set in. That feeling has stopped me in my tracks many, many times. I call them Grand Canyon Moments. What I took away was not the Canyon, but a capacity to recognize the profound and the glorious, not only in natural wonders but in stories and poems, in people, in thinking, in gestures of care. That capacity is what allows me to hold on to hope, that essential fuel for change.
Another story: Some years ago I was introduced to someone whose work I had admired for a long time already. So I was not surprised to hear, but nevertheless transfixed by, her startling clarity of thought and moral integrity. We live far apart and seldom see each other, but we talk often on the phone. I used to write frantically during those conversations, compelled by the fundamental importance of what she was saying, worried I would forget.
Eventually we settled into friendship and I no longer take notes while we talk. I write things down occasionally, but mostly I pay attention -- I listen, I ask questions, I respond to hers. So now I also know that my friend is wicked funny (I’m smiling as I type). I know some of her vulnerabilities and worries, delights and losses, small senses of pride. I experience much more deeply her humanity, as she experiences mine. Our relationship – what neither of us could make alone, moves me as much as her moral clarity. I’ve never stopped being stunned by her insight, but it’s our relationship that encourages me without end to lean ever harder into the work of change. If I had focused only on knowing, I would have missed that gift.
One last story: There’s a beach where I love to walk; it’s just before what’s called the Race, a constant roil of water where Cape Cod Bay meets the Atlantic. A few hours before and after low tide, that beach is covered with the smoothest of stones. I can’t get enough of them. Really, literally, I cannot get enough of those stones. I walk that beach looking down, then bending to snatch a perfect white oval, the grey ones with a single line of white, the stones I can see the light through. I leave the beach with my pockets full, but for every stone I keep there are thousands I’ve left behind. I’ve also unchosen a few, tossing them back into the bay. Every time I do that, as the stone leaves my hand I feel a moment of worry; should I have kept it?
In the end I have the stones I have. They are the ones I could take in, those I chose as carefully as I could. Some I have given away. The rest are in a bowl behind me on a bookshelf as I write. I used to look constantly for another bowl, a bigger one or different shape, but lately I’ve been content with the bowl I’ve got.
The life I choose includes putting my hands alongside and after countless others, endlessly bending the arc of history toward liberation. In that effort there will always be insights I miss or leave behind. I can be sure I will not see all there is to see, or learn all I need to learn.
What’s important, though, is staying open to being changed by what I do see, and by the bigger lessons around the details. It’s risking missteps and failures that will come from what I neglect and ignore. It’s choosing, over and over again, to keep my hands to the effort, accepting imperfection as part of the work.