2024-12-02
Dear Everyone,
Man, I don't know. It's been a gutshot year for a lot of us. I was tempted to avoid bringing up the elephant in the room, for the sake of peace, but that leads nowhere good that I can see. So instead I'll dig into it, and I'll preface by shamelessly stealing a P.S. from a letter a dear friend sent me earlier this year. "Obviously, I sent this assuming that you share my values. If you don't, please feel free to lose touch with me with the smug satisfaction that you are right and I'm an idiot."
I'm gobsmacked at what happened, and I can't seem to shake it off. So many people that I love will have a target on their backs come January. I have no way to process it, to make sense of it. It's got all the hallucinatory tragedy of a Biblical plague somehow clomping around in a pair of clown shoes. People chose this. They chose it. Where do you go from there?
I'm leaning hard on a thing I sometimes recite in the morning called The Five Remembrances. I won't bore you with all five of them; it's the last that's the important point here:
"My actions are my only true possessions. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground on which I stand."
I need that reminder. I get wrapped up in trying to understand things, but I wasn't put here to understand. I was put here to act, to try to leave things a little better than I found them. My actions are the ground on which I stand. Here's what I got:
The tradition I follow tells me that my job is to offer joy to one person in the morning and help relieve the grief of one person in the afternoon. If I see someone struggling, I should offer help. If I see them grieving, I should offer comfort. If they are more vulnerable than I, I should make myself into a shield and a shelter. This, as I see it, is the whole damn gig.
Living this way, even just trying to, is not easy. You have to get good at processing both fear and failure. You have to learn to rejoice over small, incremental wins, when they come. You're playing a long game. But I've looked at the other ways to live, and this is the only one that doesn't stink. Not only that, but I think it's an act of resistance.
In times like these, kindness is resistance. So is caring for others, welcoming strangers, giving aid, weeping with those who suffer. In short, giving a shit while surrounded on all sides by those who don't. In times of selfishness and greed and resentment and lust for control, rejecting those failings and striving to be more open, more loving and more helpful, even at the expense of your own comfort and certainty, is an act of resistance. We may even come to a point where it gets you in trouble. Do it anyway.
This time of year, we celebrate the birth of someone who said "whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me." Seems like a whole lot of people didn't catch that. I hope you did. I hope you will find the power to live accordingly. I hope you'll do what I struggle to do, to remind myself that it isn't about me, in my comfortable home with my wonderful family, floating on a raft of unbelievable privilege. It isn't about me. It's about what I can do for them. For you.
And I hope I will have the stones and the selflessness to back it up when I say to all of you, once more for the people in the back:
We are here.