What can we do in the midst of difficult realities?
What action can we take to feel empowered when we feel angry, hopeless or afraid?
“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.” – Mahatma Gandhi
Always first, we must tend to all of our emotions.
Sometimes this is hard without support, but we can also reach out for that support from loved ones or professionals, so that we can open to the protective anger, anxiety or frustration, and also to the sadness, the uncertainty, the grief. Anger is easier to feel sometimes, and we can get stuck there, where our anger becomes a vulnerability, a way to distract us from who we really are and the power we actually have.
We can tend to our bodies, minds and souls with compassion.
In tending to our whole selves, we liberate enormous capacity to conspire for good, to nourish one another, to harness our losses into meaningful action.
Only you can dream up the translation of your own grief and fear into tangible hope.
It might look like an inclusive act of kindness, embodying a respect for all living beings. It could be planting a tree that could long outlive this current period of history, a seedling of hope and perspective. It can take the form of a service project or charity drive as an invitation into community, a refusal to relent to those who profit from division. It might be quiet donations of time or money to causes that matter to you.
Like all living beings, we are wired to prioritize our own survival. In that sense, we are all susceptible to fear and other-ing, to sabotaging our individual and collective well-being by evaluating the world as a scarce resource and all of the diverse beings we share it with as allies or threats.
Unlike most other beings, we are also gifted and cursed with the capacity to exceed all natural limits in what we create based on our beliefs.
We can create more division, fear and hate. We can fuel the fire inside of ourselves and our communities. Or we can tend to our emotions, our well-being, our communities, and our hopes for the world.
In bravely reclaiming our hope in the dark we heal not only ourselves, but whole communities and the planet, in an abundance of small actions. Today, as with every day, we are called to author our own meaningful stories forward.
“The wound is the place where the light enters you.” – Rumi
The long run is a mystery.
We live in the short run, in the immediate now, but the long run is where the real meaning of what we are living through plays out.
Hope guarantees nothing, except our own capacity to take a small step toward it.
This is the dance of life and love, to hold open our arms to the despair or delight of this moment we are living in now without rushing, and then take small steps toward hope.
We must find ways to stay open while being devastated, in order to open after to the long run of today’s uncertainty or chaos or loss.
We are authors of meaning. As such, there will always be brave embodiments of the hope we might lose sight of, taking their own steps nearby. When we feel stuck in a story of injustice, fear, or hopelessness, let us look for those dreamers on the move.