When Things Go Wrong

-Lucinda Garthwaite, Founding Executive Director

“It is our turn to carry the world.” So begins a poem by adrienne maree brown posted in January. In it brown counsels stamina, courage, and faith. She invites community—“intertwine your roots with mine/ in this way our lives become miracles”—and of the possibility in surprising partnerships, “there will be strangers/ they will become comrades.”

Over and over the people around me ask, “What can I do?” They’re asking in the context of the chaos and uncertainty in the world. They’re asking, sometimes, about much closer in—their work, their community, their children’s school. “What can I do,” they ask, “when things seem to be going so terribly wrong?”

The answer, I think, is to choose with intention whatever is in front of us to do. Then, if  we can, looking past what’s comfortable, to do one more thing.

Also, don’t go along with what doesn’t feel right. Speaking with historian and writer Rebecca Solnit last week, nonviolence scholar Erica Chenowith reminded me that no policy or plan, no movement or group that seeks to deprive anyone from thriving, can succeed without my cooperation. Simply refusing to align with cruel limitation has changed systems—even the course of history—over and over again.

Doing that with others, Chenowith’s research has affirmed, is even more powerful. Historian Timothy Snyder writes, “Nothing is inevitable. Do not be alone and do not be dismayed. Find someone who is doing something you admire and join them.”

And also, choose love. Insist on love. “Our love is water,” brown writes, “form-shifting power, river, vapor, life,/we flood each other with belonging.”  Interviewed earlier this month, Bryan Stevenson said, “I’m the descendant of enslaved people in this country, and I wouldn’t be here if they didn’t find the power to love in the midst of agony, and in the midst of suffering.” 

Adrianne Wright,  the founder and CEO of Rosie, a storytelling agency for nonprofits, writes that in challenging times, “We find ourselves surrendering to the idea that the chaos in front of us is much too big for any feeling like love to take it on. But we must not forget [love’s] power.”

Love’s power lies in the strength that can be drawn from family and friends, but just as much, the power of love is in everyday acts of compassion, grace and generosity. Wright says, “We have learned that the quality of connection inside each pair, group, or community is what makes transformation possible. This wisdom is the torch we must use to light our way through the darkness. This is how we have always navigated toward the future.”

There’s science behind all this, too. The way to change any system is to change relationships between its parts. Pairs of people, groups, communities—those are all critical parts of human systems. Changing dynamics between them will change the systems around them. 

“The quality of connection” matters though. Molly Baldwin, the Founder and CEO of Roca, Inc. often says, “You can’t get to a good place in a bad way.” Change that’s defined by more people thriving in evermore peace isn’t served by rejection, diminishment, and hate. Choosing connection informed by love is not trivial.

Neither is rest. Writing last week in the Washington Post, essayist and fiction writer Anne Lamott invoked improbably growing things in the desert near her home, then spoke of an activist friend who “doesn’t feel very resisty yet.” In stillness, Lamott suggests, action gathers itself, getting ready to be a powerful wind. 

Until her part in that wind is clear, she writes, “This will be my fight song: left foot, right foot, breathe. Help the poor however [I] can, plant bulbs right now in the cold rocky soil, and rest.”

Rest, of course, is not enough, nor is not cooperating with cruelty and meanness, nor is loving connection. All three together are not enough. In small systems and in the world, big change requires coalition building, critical reconsideration of ideas and strategies for change. It comes with painful realizations, failures and adaptations.

When things seem to be going terribly wrong, I will be among those who take up “our turn to carry the world.” I will choose to do what is in front of me to do, rejecting cruelty, resting when I need to and seeking connections rooted in love.