When Do You Stop Clapping?

The West Coast is on fire. The Southeast is underwater, and it’s only the start of hurricane season. Nazis are feeling their oats, and the jackass we elected President is having a pissing match with a nuclear power when he’s not announcing his intention to deport a million people who are better citizens than he or I have ever been. Daily life is surreal, like we’re clapping and clapping, trying to believe hard enough to bring Tinkerbell back to life. Tinkerbell being a world where it makes sense to do things like buy houses and have children and plan for your retirement.

When do you stop clapping? When do you stop thinking the world will go on as it has, and start planning for contingencies that were science fiction two years ago? What does that even mean? Buy a gun? A bunch of canned food and bottled water? Order an apocalypse kit from the Mormons on Amazon and stop at every gas station you pass so when the moment comes you’ll have a full tank? Where will you even go?

I’m sitting here with a to-do list a mile long. I’ve got businesses to grow, a novel to finish, people who expect me to make things for them and do things to make their homes nicer. But I look outside, and I can’t see the fucking sky for the smoke, and people in the place I grew up (Florida) are bracing for a hurricane that’ll ravage the whole state whichever of the approximately five thousand possible paths it might take heading inland it ultimately does.

I’m sitting here paralyzed, because if Tinkerbell’s dead then I’m crazy to worry over what things make a normal life. If she isn’t I need to clap harder than ever, knowing it might not be enough. We all do, together.

I honestly don’t know what’s to come. Whatever it turns out to be will be hard, for all of us. It already is.

I don’t have much in the way of encouraging words today. So I’ll borrow some from people much wiser than I.

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”
-Fred Rogers

“Be the change you want to see in the world.”
-Gandhi

I Know Why Nero Fiddled

I also know that that probably didn’t happen. But whatever its authenticity, the image of the emperor playing the fiddle while Rome burned endures. In common usage, it means ‘to occupy oneself with unimportant matters and neglect priorities during a crisis.’ Like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

But it’s not rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It’s more like the band playing on as the ship upended and sank. It’s making art in the face of ongoing or oncoming catastrophe.

Half the people I know have some kind of creative pursuit as a way of making meaning in their lives. From what social media tells me, most of them are having problems working. It makes sense. Why bother making things when the whole world is going to shit? Is that really the best use of your time? What even is the best use of your time? Which fire should you be helping to put out? Or should you lay stores in and plan for the aftermath, look out for you and yours?

I don’t know the answers to those questions. Telling truth I have the opposite problem. I get up everyday and work on my novel, however I’m feeling, whether I want to or not. I can’t even imagine stopping, even though I think there’s a solid and growing chance that it’s pointless, at least in terms of getting it published and out into the reading world. Who even reads anymore, right? Who has time, what with Rome burning all around us?

There’s people who say making art’s more important than ever, times like these. Whether you’re offering distraction or insight or just putting our anxious and angst-ridden zeitgeist to words or images or music, what matters is the human spirit striving to make beauty and sense from a world sorely lacking in both.

That may be. But it’s not why I show up to work in the morning. I do it because it feeds me. Because it gives my life meaning and shape. Because I’ve known my whole life this is what I was meant for, whether I chose it or it chose me.

Because without it, I don’t know how I’d go on.

Why Thinking About Death Will Make Your Life Easier and Better

We’re all conflicted sometimes. We find ourselves at a crossroads, looking one way, then the other, trying to see down the road to where it goes and what’ll happen to us along the way. Each has its virtues, each its shortcomings. The tradeoffs can be murky. Or not. Sometimes it’s a matter of what to prioritize. Career or family? Passion or stability? Travel or save your money? The right answer depends on so many factors it can feel impossible to game them out clearly enough to pick. The one thing you can be sure of is you can’t have it all. You have to choose.

For some of us – and I count myself as such a person – it can be paralysing, and we get stuck in a loop, hemming and hawing and unable to commit until outside forces make the decision for us. It’s a relief, in a way, since we’re absolved of the emotional consequences of making a hard decision. But there’s always ‘What if..?” The what-ifs will dog you, never leave you in peace.

So how does a person make hard decisions? It’s a question each person must answer themselves. Different people will have different answers, but here’s mine:

I imagine myself on my deathbed. The end is nigh. There’s no more time, no chance to change what’s come before. It is, as they say, all over but the crying.

What would I wish I had done?

Nine times out of ten, the answer becomes clear immediately.

No one likes to think about death, especially their own. I get it. It’s scary. And whatever you think comes after, whether it’s heaven or reincarnation or just… nothing, there’s little question that death is the end of the story of your life.

But in the face of death, life clarifies. The jumble of conflicting priorities pulling you this way and that gets a lot simpler. What matters, what really matters, jumps to the forefront of your consciousness, shining and obvious, and the provisional and secondary drops away. It isn’t gone, but its volume is reduced, its relative importance put into perspective. Decisions become much easier.

I first came to this realization decades ago, as a college student. But it wasn’t until my mother died eight years ago that it really hit home. I mourned my own loss, of course. But what broke my heart hardest was knowing that she had died without ever really being happy. Maybe happy isn’t the word I’m looking for, since we most all of us are afforded some happy moments in life. Maybe the word I’m looking for is content.

See, my mother always did what was expected of her. She got married, had a kid, worked hard, saved her money. All the things society says lead to a full and happy life. But she was always nagged by the feeling that she was missing something, and all the hoops she jumped dutifully through did not deliver the promised reward. She wasn’t bitter about it – well, sometimes, sure – but there was a kind of sadness in her, as if the life she lived and the choices she made were those expected of her, and not what she might have chosen for herself. Indeed, I don’t know if she ever knew what her true self might have chosen, because the weight of expectation life put on her gave her little chance to explore who that was. The best I ever heard her explain it was she felt like she was an artist who never found her medium.

That, more than anything – even my own loss – broke my heart when she died. All her chances were used up. There was no time left to turn things around, to find the medium that would let her true self express, to live a life worth dying for.

And of all the lessons her passing taught me, that’s the one that stuck firmest in my consciousness. That only when confronted with death do we know what is most valuable in life.

And so, to this day and til my last, that’s what I think of when I decide what to do, what choice to make, how to live my life. When I am on my deathbed, and there is no more time, what would I wish I had done?

What Do We Accomplish By Marching?

Donald Trump is still President. His cabinet of incompetents, grifters, and deplorables is as likely as ever to be confirmed. The conservative agenda of small-government austerity and the rollback of hard-won rights and protections is still on the table in a House and Senate likely to ram them through and — to borrow a phrase from the folks doing the ramming — down the throats of the citizens of these United States, whether we like it or not.

But yesterday, the day after the least popular incoming President in history held his poorly-attended inauguration, four million Americans took to the streets of cities and towns across the country to march for women’s equality and women’s rights.

A cynical person might ask what it is we think we accomplished. All of the above is still true, after all, and it’s unlikely to change as a direct result of the largest political demonstration in our nation’s history.

It’s a fair question.

The simplest answer is that we came out and showed our sheer numbers. It makes a splash, makes the media pay attention. It changes the conversation. It puts our elected representatives on notice that the ideals and policies we marched for has a constituency they ignore at their political peril.

Those answers are meaningful. Important. But they aren’t the whole story.

A cloud has hung over vast swathes of the American people these last two and a half months. A feeling like we lost something important. Like something critical to our happiness, our well-being, our safety both personal and economic died. We have been grieving that loss. Mourning it. Fighting hopelessness and despair.

But not today.

Today my social media feed is full of fired-up, hopeful, and energized people. People ready to organize and fight for what they believe in. People whose faith is re-energized. People whose hope is restored. Whose resolve is galvanized, and whose hearts know joy again after a long, gray season of despair.

And that, to me, is the real answer to the question. What do we accomplish by marching?

We march to turn grief into power.

And with our faith re-energized, our hope restored, our resolve galvanized and our hearts filled with joy, we will overcome. We will bend the moral arc of history towards justice. We will make an America whose greatness isn’t grounded in power or wealth, but in fidelity to our highest ideals: to life, liberty, equality, opportunity, and security for every American regardless of who they are, what they want, or what they believe.

Yes we will.

What I Will Do Today

Today I will work on my novel. I will string words together in service to a story and character that grabbed hold of me four years ago and still won’t let go. A story of, in its essence, a clear-eyed woman’s ascent into power from nothing, fueled by her wit, grit, and resolve.

Today I will go to my wood shop. I will take salvage and scrap, the used-up, cast-off pieces, and make them into something useful and beautiful, through the work of my hands and the labor of my heart and mind.

Today I will go to the gym. I will challenge and refine my imperfect body, work it to exhaustion, that it might become stronger and healthier for the work that lies ahead.

Today I will read a book. I will fall into another world, another mind, another way of seeing and experiencing, that my own world, my own mind, my own way of seeing and experiencing will become larger, more encompassing, more compassionate and clear.

Today I will be kind to every person I meet. I will willfully and purposefully manifest what is best in me, and offer it freely to all I encounter. I will do my best to be the change I want to see in the world, to let the better angels of my nature take flight.

And tomorrow? Tomorrow, I will march. But today I will do those things that give my life meaning. I will ground myself in them, to give me strength and fuel my resolve for the long, dark road ahead.