The Long View (Netzach)

You are not expected to complete the work in your lifetime, nor may you refuse to do your unique part

- Rabbi Tarfon

There’s a story that has been at the top of my mind lately. I have found myself telling it in nearly every class I teach, and many of the conversations I have. It’s an old story that I’ve heard different versions of over the years and I don’t quite know to whom I should attribute it. The version of the story that I’ve been telling goes something like this:

This is a story about a person in a moment of searching. Their world was full of conflict and strife, and while they were committed to taking action towards the betterment of their world, they did not know what to do, where to begin, or how to go about working for the change that they knew was needed. After many years of efforts that did not feel fruitful, they became disillusioned with their work and set off in search of a piece of wisdom that could help them navigate the challenging times that they were living through.

One day their journey brought them to a remote castle at the top of a mountain where they had heard there lived a wise elder. They arrived at the castle, as people often do in these kinds of stories, at dusk just as a storm of wind and rain was making its way up the mountain. Upon entering the castle they were greeted by a young person who took care of the elder. This host told our traveler that the elder could be found at the top room of the castle. They then gave our traveler a cup filled to the brim with oil, and told them that to see the elder they must bring this cup to the top room without spilling any along the way. 

Our traveler, up to the challenge, took the cup of oil and - very slowly and very carefully - made their way through the castle, passing through every room, with their attention focused on the very full cup of oil. Finally, our traveler reached the top room and, not having spilled a single drop, felt accomplished and ready to receive the wisdom they had been seeking. 

The elder greeted them warmly and, referencing the storm that was approaching, invited the traveler to spend the night. “As you walked through the castle”, the elder asked, “which room called most to you?” The traveler was taken aback, first by the kindness of the elder, but also by the fact that they had to admit that they were not called by any of the rooms, for they were so focused on not spilling the oil that they barely noticed any of their surroundings. “Well”, said the elder, “you must walk around the castle again and this time notice the rooms, notice the art, the views, the feel you get from each one”.

So our traveler, cup of oil still in hand, set back out through the castle, this time placing their attention on the many beautiful paintings and sculptures that filled the rooms and halls. A few hours later, our traveler returned to the top room where the elder sat, this time curled up in a chair by the fire. The traveler was in a state of euphoric awe, so beautiful the art and views that filled the castle were. For nearly twenty minutes, the traveler described in stunning detail each painting, each sculpture, each view from a window that called to them, as well as the feelings and sensations that these experiences stirred up. 

When the traveler finished, the elder, having smiled through the entire monologue, took a deep breath and gently asked, “and the cup of oil?”

The traveler looked at their hands and noticed that the cup was gone, but there were oil stains on the legs of their pants. With their attention on the beauty that surrounded them, the traveler had completely lost track of the cup of oil they were holding, first letting the oil spill then, absentmindedly, placing the cup down somewhere they did not remember. 

The elder, noticing the shock on the travelers face upon realizing this, smiled at them and then turned back to the fire. 

I think the reason that this story has been living so close to the surface for me these last months is that one of the biggest challenges that I, and many of the people I’ve come across, are struggling with in this moment, is how to find the balance between looking at the big picture and focusing on the very practical tasks at hand. 

Many of us are finding ourselves narrowing our vision, focusing so much of our attention on each and every horrific news story that comes across our feed that we can barely breath. We are literally constricting our airways with the narrowness of our attention, completely unaware of the beauty that still exists in the world, almost determined to not see it because the task at hand feels so important and so impossible. 

An antidote to this narrowing of focus that helps me in these moments is to take a deep breath, take a step back, widen the scope of my vision, and take the long view. The long view reminds me that the horror and the suffering that is showing itself in the world is not particular to this moment, that throughout time there have always been forces of greed and destruction, there has always been strife and conflict, and there have always been people working towards making things better, there have always been people driven by and towards love, there is always beauty to be found, to be inspired by. 

Taking the long view allows me to place myself in a lineage of these people, it allows me to learn from and be inspired by them, it allows me to imagine the world I want to live in and find the paths that might lead us in that direction. 

But I want to be clear, the long view is not about getting caught in abstractions, getting wrapped up in utopian dreams to the point that I lose touch with reality. The long view invites me to place the moment we are living through in context: to look at reality right in the face, get clear on the places where my actions can be impactful, take those actions, and keep my eyes up and looking in the direction I want us to be going. 

Taking the long view allows us to imagine the world we want to get to while acting in the world that we currently are in.

Joy & Sadness (Tiferet)

…Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain…When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight…. Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy…

- Excerpted from Kahlil Gibran’s On Joy and Sorrow

It has often been the case in my life that moments of exuberance and fulfillment have been accompanied by deep sadness and heartbreak. I do not think I am unique in this experience, though I may be particularly attuned to the ways in which my emotional body experiences and has had to practice holding both. 

In the early spring of 2011, a dream that had lived in me for many years was actually coming to fruition. The outdoor education program that I had designed and had been running piecemeal versions of for a few years had finally reached the point where I could hire a full staff for a month-long run of programs. During the first week of programming, I received some news that cracked open a deep well of personal heartbreak. The next few weeks were filled with a profound experience of dissonance. 

I would, in one moment, be fully present to the incredible dream unfolding around me: interacting with groups of middle and high school students as they made their way through our obstacle courses, supporting my staff as they built supportive relationships with the students, and coaching teacher chaperones. In those moments I felt so vibrant, so fulfilled, so clear headed and alive in my body. 

And then, when stepping away from the group, the deepest forms of agony would wrap themselves around my body. I would be walking the path from the camping meadow and I would suddenly have to stop, unable to catch my breath, unable to tame the beast of grief erupting from my heart. Barely able to hold myself up, I would collapse and cry until I regained enough strength to make it back to my cabin. 

At the time I had a lot of feelings about having to hold these two things together. It didn’t feel fair that this Joy that I was experiencing in the fruition of one of my dreams would have to be diminished by a wound from a different part of my heart. 

A few years later, in the early fall of 2015 I was in a different moment of deep heartbreak and an existential undoing. This one was not paired with any dream fulfillment and had me stuck in a deep state of Sadness. One afternoon, on the advice of a friend, I walked into a near empty movie theater and went to sit near the back. Aside from me, the theater was sprinkled with a handful of young children and their adult caretakers. The movie, Inside Out, follows the inner emotional life of a young girl as she navigates a new and stressful moment in her life. 

What I especially loved about the movie was the relationship that developed between the emotions Joy and Sadness. When, towards the end of the film, Joy realizes that Sadness is the only one that can help break the main character out of her place of emotional overload and willingly gives over the controls, I found myself crying uncontrollable tears. It was a truly beautiful moment, the recognition of the place and power of Sadness. 

At the time I was deeply invested in the power of sadness. The friend who recommended I see the movie did so because of the sadness she recognized in me. I had let sadness take the controls and steer me into a place of deep and prolonged grieving. It was not pleasant but it was necessary. 

Looking back at that version of myself, there was another big takeaway from the movie that - while I may not have articulated it at the time, did resonate with the way that I understood my emotional world. Soon after the climactic tears, Joy and Sadness learn how to share the controls, they learn how to live in the main character together, and they start producing memory balls that glow blue and gold - that contain Sadness and Joy together.

This week, I have been holding in my body that very familiar feeling of Joy and Sadness. I spent much of this week operating at my very best: sharing in powerful learning, deep conversation, laughter and play, song and dance with wonderful friends from many of my communities. And, in every one of those moments, there is an underlying sense that I might, at any moment, collapse into a puddle of tears that are living just a millimeter beneath the surface. It has been a full and beautiful week. 

Fortitude (Gevurah)

“Like water, be gentle and strong. Be gentle enough to follow the natural paths of the earth and strong enough to rise up and reshape the world”

― Brenda Peterson

There is no sensation quite like the feel of water rushing over my body. When swept up in the force of a roaring river or a crashing wave I lose the boundaries of my body. For just a moment I am a particle of water, connected more to the thing we call river or ocean than to the thing I think of as self. It is a beautiful and terrifying experience: the oneness, the surrender. And it is an experience whose beauty I could not see until I learned to sit in the discomfort of the terror. 

The first time the ocean took me the beauty of the experience was not available, I only felt the terror, I only felt the panic of losing control.

I was eight or nine years old and spending the day with my family at the beach. The ocean was strong that day and it was a beach that I was unfamiliar with. As I played along the shoreline, creeping further out towards the break, a giant wave came and took me. Later I would learn about body surfing, about catching a wave and riding it back to shore. This was not that. This was the wave catching me. This was getting picked up, tossed around, and turned head over heels. There was no riding happening here, this was being hurled. 

When I returned to myself, when I could once again  feel the boundaries of my body, I was lying naked on the shoreline. I had literally been thrown out of my shorts. I was terrified. I was embarrassed. There was water all the way up my nose and sand in every crevice of my body. 

I was, at the time, what you might call a very floppy kid. I was not connected to the strength that lived in my body. I was not accustomed to holding myself upright, preferring to lean, to rest my weight on what I perceived to be a more solid surface - the wall, my bed, a parent. Later I would learn to stand upright, to recognize the boundaries of my body, to feel the stability of my own balance. But on that day when the water first took me I didn’t have the fortitude to hold my body together to the point that I could allow it to dissolve. I didn’t know enough about the boundaries of my own body to be able to discern if this experience made me feel unsafe or just uncomfortable. 

When the ocean swallowed me up and spat me back out, was it telling me “Stop! This is Unsafe! Do Not Enter!”? Or was it saying, “Slow down… get your bearings… center yourself and this is something you will be able to manage…  come towards me at a pace that you can handle”?

When reflecting on those questions I start with the truth that, yes, the ocean is dangerous. But, more than that, I didn’t know enough about the ocean. I didn’t yet know about riptides. I didn’t know what to do to keep myself safe. I didn’t know what signs  to look for, I didn’t know how to measure the ristk. As I learned more about the environment of the ocean and the container of my body the experience of being tossed by the waves stopped feeling unsafe. 

Once I started feeling safe, it took a lot of work to build up my ability to sit with and embrace the discomfort of being tossed under water. But building up my strength to ensure that I was safe, building up my capacity to sit in the discomfort of being tossed, unlocked one of the most profoundly joyous sensory experiences that I now get to have. It didn’t just come. I had to work for it. I had to embrace the discomfort. I had to build the fortitude in my body, to be clear about my boundaries. I had to have the strength to hold myself up, to hold myself together so that I could experience the wonder of surender into the oneness. I had to have a strong container, I had to have deep awareness of that container,  in order to experience the bliss that comes with letting it dissolve. 

Choosing Love (Chesed)

One year, on the last night of a summer camp I was the director of, a camper who had just performed a picture perfect impression of me in the closing talent show, came to find me. He was feeling mixed emotions about leaving camp and returning home, and wanted to talk. We talked about his experience of the summer, the things that stood out to him, the memories he was leaving with, the changes he’d gone through. At one point in our conversation he turned to me and asked, why are you all so nice here? 

The question caught me off guard, and it took a while for me to understand what he was getting at. He wasn’t remarking on a personality trait that happened to be common in our staff members. He was asking about our pedagogy. He was wondering what it was that allowed us as a staff to choose to be kind and caring. He was asking what it was that allowed us to make so much space for him as a camper, to not be triggered by his actions and behaviors, to not respond to him with harshness even when he was not showing up at his best. He wanted to know what made us continue choosing love, even in the stressful moments. 

As an educator I often find myself in community building circles in which a common prompt for introductions is to share, along with your name, one of your super powers. The prompt is meant to invite us to think about the strengths that we have and can offer a group. Answers to this kind of prompt can get very fun and creative. I love to hear what people recognize as their strengths and the ways they find to communicate them as super powers. 

An answer that I often give is that I have x-ray vision. I have an ability to see through people’s armor, to look past the protective layers that we put up, to catch a glimpse of who we really are underneath the masks that we wear: behind the fears, the trauma, the shame, the projections. It is this superpower that allows me to, as my camper put it, “be so nice” or as I would say, to choose love.

Like any superpower, this is an ability that has to be honed, a skill that has to be practiced. Superman doesn’t walk around seeing through buildings, and I don’t walk around seeing through people’s masks. I have to choose it. I have to remember that I believe that deep down we all want love, we want to love, and we want to be loved. So, to activate this superpower I take a breath, I look at the person in front of me, I allow my eyes to soften, and I let go of whatever projections I am placing on them.

It isn’t always easy. There are many people and types of behaviors that continue to trigger me. I do not always succeed at activating my x-ray vision. But when I do turn my ex-ray vision on it allows me to see beyond the hard layers we put up and into the essence of a person, into their soul. And by seeing the essence of a person, it makes it easier to choose to love them. It makes it easier to choose love when I might otherwise choose fear. 

There is a lot to be scared of in the world right now. We are living in a time of deep uncertainty, acute tension, and informational overload. We are living in a time where emotions are heightened and suspicion is much easier to access than trust. We are living in a time where the masks are thick and the armor is heavy. The illusion of stability that many of us were raised to believe in is cracking, the systems that had been presented to us as stable and static are in a process of collapse, and whether we liked the status quo as it was or fought against it with all our might, to see it so rapidly dissolve can be quite unsettling. 

It is hard in this kind of moment to show up at one’s best, and even harder to see the best in others. It is hard to choose love when there is so much to be afraid of. And yet, choosing love, finding ways to see the best in others, to see through each other’s armor, to look past each other’s fears, underneath each other’s masks might be our best hope, might just be the key to our survival.

Wholeness (Malkhut/Shechinah)

Sometimes I do not feel like my whole self. When I begin to get depleted I can feel disconnected, fragmented, cut off from some of my parts, from some of my selves. It can feel as though they are hiding from me, or perhaps we are hiding from each other. 

One of the signposts I have learned to notice that tells me that this disconnection might be happening is that I find myself seeking out distractions - often in the form of bad television, word games, and spatial logic puzzles. Social media was a very easy place to find this kind of distraction until I made a clean break from all of those platforms a year ago. 

But deleting social media and removing game apps from my phone does not address the root problem. Of course, the apps that are designed to capture my attention and bury me in an avalanche of distraction do not help with my feelings of fragmentation and disconnection. They actively prey on those feelings and they certainly exacerbate the depletion of my energy, but they are not the cause. The cause is something deeper, so the solution must be as well. 

When I find myself seeking out distraction it is usually because I know that there are feelings that I do not want to sit with. I know what sitting with grief and fear and rage feels like. I know the pain that welcoming those emotions in can bring. I know the energy that releasing them requires. And when my capacity is low I do not trust that I can handle that kind of emotional outpouring. So in those moments of depletion, when I begin to feel those emotions start bubbling up, when I begin to feel the discordance and the discomfort, I choose distraction, I choose compartmentalization. 

But I do not stay there. I have learned that these strategies of avoidance can be effective in the short term but they come with an expiration date. If I don’t tend to the root issue, if I don’t sit with the grief, confront the fear, release the rage, then they will start to consume me, the fragmentation and disconnection will grow deeper, and the discord I feel in my body will get louder until I have to address it head on or disassociate from it completely. 

My hope is that the distractions can buy me some time to rest, to defuse the intensity of the feelings, and to set up the conditions in which I can do a full confrontation. 

These full confrontations with myself and my emotions often take the shape of a ritual. I light candles, I give myself journaling and meditation prompts, I play music to invite movement into my body, and I make sure to go outside, touch a plant, and look up at the sky. These connection points with my senses pull me out of my head, out of the panic-inducing thought spirals, and allow me to connect with my body, with my breath, with the wider world around me. 

And in those connections I begin making my way back to wholeness. And in my wholeness I begin to feel at one with myself, my communities, and the larger ecosystems that my life is bound up in. And then my breath flows with ease.

Core Values (Yesod)

I have been spending a lot of time recently thinking about values, specifically values as the pillars that we build our life upon, as the lenses that we look at the world through, and as the engines that we want to have drive our actions. 

About ten years ago I started drawing a picture of a person holding a kite. The person was a stick figure who lived on the bottom left corner of the page and the kite would be flying up near the top right. On the edges of the kite I would write out the core values that I wanted to center in my life. On the string holding the kite and the ribbons flying off of it I would write out other values that I wanted to remember, values that would help me live up to those core values on the kite. I’m not sure why I chose the imagery of the kite, perhaps I wanted to represent reaching and pulling at the same time. Whatever the reason, the imagery stuck and this stick figure holding a kite became the visual representation of my core values. It aslo became something I would repeatedly draw in all my various notebooks, a doodle, something to do with my hands while sitting through a meeting. 

Eventually I noticed that the values I wrote along the drawing would change. Sometimes a value moved its position, other times a value would be replaced. I noticed that each time I sat down to draw this image I was honing my list of values, and I was developing a deeper understanding of them, of how they operated in me, of how they related to each other. 

Spending time reflecting on and discovering what it is that we want to center ourselves in, that we want to be dirven by, that we want expressed in the ways we show up to the world, is one of the ways that I believe we can become better at knowing ourselves. And I believe that the more we know ourselves, the more we can actually be ourselves, and the more we can be ourselves, the more ease we will find in navigating this world. 

So what are values and how do we know what ours are? 

One way I think about discovering my values is to ask what it is that sits at the core of the core of my being? If I strip away all of the habits, all of the context, all of the conditioning, what am I left with? What is my essence made of? 

When I think about these question for myself, the answer I always come to is love. What else is there? Love of people, love of experience, love of all that is possible in the world. 

And when I trace love through my life I see that it has always been a driving force in obvious and also in not so obvious ways. When I look at my adolescent self and reflect on the anger that drove me into activism, and the fire that drove me to put so much energy into creating revolutionary spaces in the world, one of the primary things I see underneath that fire and anger was how deeply heartbroken I was about the world. 

I believe we all experience this heartbreak. The world that we are born into is not the world that we would want. Perhaps it never was, perhaps we are born dreamers, perhaps it is our lot to be aspirational, to be utopian in our imagination. Children at their core are full of love, they want to be loved, they demand to be loved. They tell you what they want and need, they instruct you as to how you might fulfill those needs for them. 

Thinking of children also makes me think of curiosity, of asking questions and doing the work of putting the world together. I suspect curiosity might be another one of my core values, another piece of my essence, but there’s something about it that feels a degree off. As much as I love and have always loved learning I am not a traditional learner. I do not devour information the way many of my most curious friends do. There have been and continue to be times in my life that I struggle with the fact that my form of learning is not primarily through reading books and gathering information, but is more through paying attention to my emotions and experiences. 

When I think about how curiosity lives in me it is a curiosity that isn’t about knowledge and answers, it is about possibility and questions. It’s almost as though as soon as something can be known it is no longer interesting to me. Perhaps a better word than curiosity for me is wonder. Wonder is expansive, wonder is interested not in an answer but in the question, in the possibility of what might be. Wonder embraces uncertainty, it leaves room for that which we cannot understand, it is incapable of wrapping itself up in a neat bow. Wonder is what drives me to look at the moon, know that I cannot completely wrap my head around it, and smile at the mystery. 

Wonder and Love make for great foundational partners, and feel quite true to my essence. But there is something else there. When I first did this exercise, I found myself feeling slightly dissatisfied with leaving it just at that. And I came to understand a truth about myself that I had known for some time and that made me a little uncomfortable. The third element of my essence is dissatisfaction itself. Along with that understanding came the realization that the way my dissatisfaction showed up was causing me quite a bit of suffering. It was keeping me chasing a set of moving goal posts. It was compelling me to value my losses more than my wins. And it was punishing me for never being enough. 

And this raises for me a question about core values: what do I do when there is something core to my being that I’m not sure I want to build my foundation upon, that I’m not sure I want to see the world through the prism of, that I’m not sure I want driving my actions? 

The truth is, all of our values contain a shadow side. They can sometimes show up in ways that are not great for us, that are not representative of the ways that we aspire to be. When my heart is broken love can send me into fits of rage and anger. When I am sad wonder can lead me into negative thought spirals. Likewise, dissatisfaction, which can lead with its shadow, has also shown up in ways help me reach the version of myself that I aspire towards. 

In the right light, my dissatisfaction shows up as rigor, it propels me into action, pushes me into the world even when I want to retreat from it.  Dissatisfaction can be the catalyst that drives me to take on hard things and not give up when at first they don’t work out.

With all of that being said, dissatisfaction does not show up on my kite. I do not reject it because it is a part of me, and I have learned to see the ways it is a helpful part of me - a part of me that I can embrace. But that doesn’t mean I want to center it in my life, in the image that I look towards. It is a core part of me but I have decided to not have it live as one of my core values. 

And that brings us back to my practice of drawing and redrawing the kite. When we take time to sit with the attributes that are core to our beings, to reflect of which parts of them we do and do not want to call into our lives, to decide on the values that we want to call ourselves towards, we get to bring our own agency into the creation of the person we are and the person we aspire to continue growing towards. 

This practice of naming and describing and regularly mulling over and reconsidering our values, I believe, is one way that we can do the work of becoming the person we would most like to see ourselves as.

Acceptance (Hod)

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

~Reinhold Niebuhr 

In my early adolescence I remember coming to an understanding that the world I had been born into was deeply not okay, and asking myself how I could be okay living that world: How could I be okay living in a world where innocent children were killed by the police because of the color of their skin? How could I be okay living in a world where wars were fought for control over natural resources or animals were factory farmed for mass consumption? How could I be okay living in a world whose entire system was designed to benefit a very few while exploiting so many? 

I struggled for a long time with how I could accept living in such a world and concluded that I could not. I could not accept this world as it was. I could not just go about my life and pay attention in school. I could not pretend that the little bubble of safety that surrounded me was real, permanent, or in any way deserved. But when I looked around at my peers and my teachers, it seemed to me like they had all accepted it, like they were okay with it. They all seemed to just be going along with the program, unperturbed by these larger questions, and certainly uninterested in my discontent at the state of things. 

It was this version of acceptance that I saw around me that made me bump up against the serenity prayer the first time I came across it. Accept the things I cannot change… But that was all I saw around me: an acceptance of things as they are; a deep belief - almost to the point of an ideology -in throwing one's hands up at the larger problems of the world; an almost rabid commitment to the maintenance of the status quo. So, accept the things I cannot change… Thank you, but no. I will continue spending my energy fighting against all the things… whether I have the ability to change them or not. 

I was living in a paradigm where acceptance was synonymous with defeat, with weakness, with appeasement, with rolling over and letting the powers that be march across your chest while they spit on your face. I didn’t want to accept, I wanted to fight, I wanted to win, and if I wasn’t going to win, I wanted to die trying. Either way, I  was certainly not going to embrace defeat, and I had no interest in meeting acceptance with any modicum of serenity. If I knew anything, I knew that I was not okay with things as they were and the very notion of acceptance felt like a betrayal of that knowing, felt like it required condoning all of those things that I knew were wrong.

But this was before my first experience of burnout. This was before I did nearly die trying. I was not, to my knowledge, near a physical death but I was certainly on the brink of a spiritual one. My refusal to accept the limits of my own capacity, or the things in the world that were beyond my scope of influence had me entrenched in a fight, not with the powers that be, not with any oppressive force, but with reality itself. My refusal to accept things as they are brought the fight I was so poised to have to the only place it could exist… myself. Because reality cannot be different than it is, my refusal to accept it could only manifest in anxiety or depression, physical and existential pain I would exert upon my own body and being. It was this internal wear and tear as much as any external over exertion that led directly to my burnout. Eventually, in order to come out of it, to begin my healing and recovery, I would have to accept the reality I was living in, I would have to accept the limitations of my own capacity, and I would have to accept that failing to achieve something that I so badly wanted did not, in fact, have to be the end of my life. 

This experience of burnout would not be the last time I caught myself fighting reality, nor was it the first. In my early twenties, during the summer between my first and second year teaching, my father was diagnosed with cancer. It was so unexpected that it took a few times hearing the news before it registered, and even then I didn’t get anywhere near understanding, let alone accepting it.  Over the course of the 13 months between his diagnosis and his death I mostly lived inside of a delusion. It was a delusion comprised mainly of denial, rationalization, and a good amount of disassociation. I knew he was sick, I knew he could die, I just didn’t think he would. 

And then he did. And the delusion broke. Reality set it very quickly: the reality that I would never see him again, the reality that there was nothing I could do, and nothing I could have done. The choice for me then became: to fight this reality or to accept it, to live inside the delusion that no longer had any legs to stand on or to face the hard truth that my life would never be the same - that my world would never be the same. I was tempted to keep fighting: to stay in bed, to live in the world of my dreams where he was still alive, where this whole experience with cancer never happened. In my dreams I could rewrite the story of the previous year. And I did many times. But I kept on waking up, and with each return to consciousness came the agony of my grief. Reality is not kind, but it is undefeated. So I chose acceptance.

This, however, is where I still disagree with Niebuhr. I do not think acceptance comes through serenity, but through struggle. In my experience there is nothing peaceful in the process of coming to accept a reality that I do not like, rather it is an internally violent process of facing my pain, of learning to sit with my grief, of letting the emotions manifest in physical form and move out of my body - through crying, and shaking, and wailing, and punching my pillow while screaming into it until I collapse. 

But through this painful process to look reality straight in the eyes, face to face and come to acceptance, I have found a kind of serenity, an ability to walk in the world with a modicum of peace, with an ability to breath and to be, in the face of just how fucked everything is and has been for a very long time. Sitting with that reality, sitting in the discomfort of what truly is can be deeply unsettling, even disregulating. Staying in it, not slipping into delusion, not slipping into despair, takes a lot of practice, takes a lot of fortitude. I think it might take as much - if not more - courage to accept reality as it actually is than it does to change the things we can.

So in this or any moment when a reality we do not want and are not okay with starts settling in, the advice I would give my younger self, the advice I would hope that I could follow today would be: to look that reality directly in the eyes, face to face; to not slip into a delusion that it can be different than it is; to not become okay with it and to not fight it; to sit with the discomfort of it, with the grief, with the rage, with pain of that reality; to let those emotions manifest and release - to cry, and shake, and wail, and punch the pillow, and collapse. Then… to stand up; to breathe; to look at the beauty that is still here in the world and recognize that as reality as well; to call a friend; and find the courage to change something you can. Because once you’ve found the courage to see things as they actually are, the courage to change something that can be changed will not be hard to muster.