meaningful action in 2020

Here we are, a few weeks into 2020. How are those resolutions going? A friend committed to working out and a strict daily diet, but she just confessed she ate an entire bag of Doritos before the sweat from one of her workouts dried on her skin. Another friend always commits to “Dry January,” but the Titans keep winning, so he feels like it is best for him to drink while watching, given his habit of doing so. Our collective failure at resolving to utterly transform our habits suggests we should rethink our resolution game plan.

Last week I tried to make the case that instead of making big resolutions, we should simply prepare for the year before us. It is an election year, and given the reality that our news consumption and living habits are highly segregated, most of us think the opinions of half the citizenry are ignorant, or destructive. Given this reality, it is helpful to resolve to practice and develop habits of empathy. Empathy fosters connection with others, humanizing people we don’t understand (Read the essay preceding this one if you like this line of thinking). It forces us to think outside our own thoughts and look instead to the perspective of another. This small instinct, nurtured and developed over time, strengthens what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr called a “single garment of destiny.” In a letter he wrote from jail, he reminded us that we are “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,” and that because of our connectedness, “whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” The habituated practice of empathy reminds us that King was right. Our shared humanity rejects apathy as a cruel response to the pain of another.

Empathy makes us responsible for words uttered and actions completed in our presence. It requires us to care. This leads me to the second resolution I suggest as we prepare for 2020: To action. Dr. Seuss famously wrote, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” Seuss understood the power of empathy to spur action, because he knew that recognizing our connectedness leads to empathy, and empathy leads to understanding, and understanding leads to a will to help, and that will leads to action. The other truth Seuss reveals is that meaningful action is always personal.

This year, establish what you care about and then do what you can do in that space. I have wildly different views from many peers about what a just and healthy society might look like. I now understand that I respect those who consistently (and sacrificially) act to pursue their vision of justice, even if it differs from mine. Words are cheap and often inflaming, but action requires a commitment to do something. The doing of a thing teaches us, exposing us to a different aspect of our position.

We know that big arguments about what America is, has been, or should be are coming. While some folks pretend they are above it all, most of us will be drawn in to conversations in which both parties claim to hold positions we have hardly ever considered. I might spontaneously become an expert on criminal justice or the minimum wage, even if I rarely share space with a person whose life is chronically impacted by current policies or realities. Here it is useful to consider the words of Edward Abbey, apostle of the wilderness, and wild protector of natural spaces for the sake of us all. He argued, and seemed to embody, the following: “Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.”  

This year, resolve to act. Don’t just offer sentiments; instead, take action. Don’t just complain about the poor communication from your school, neighborhood or faith group; instead, offer your help to streamline and organize information. Don’t just pontificate on the indulgence of food stamps; instead, find and support a school with a Backpack food program, or try to live and feed your family on minimum wage. Don’t just rant about the destruction of the environment; instead, offer to recycle for your neighbors or commit to biking and walking for any trip under three miles. Don’t just talk about lives destroyed by abortion; instead, foster a child, get involved with a women’s health clinic, advocate for universal and ubiquitous birth control, or find and support schools with daycare for students who are also parents. Don’t just lament the shallow or disconnected state of our communities; instead, host an evening where people intentionally engage in conversations that resonate. 

 If you resolve to act in 2020, know that it is best to do what you can do instead of what you cannot. Committing to act in a way that is foreign or far outside your sphere of experience will likely lead to failure. And yet, empathy-driven action revives the soul, facilitates meaningful connections, and humbles our tendency to shout our opinions. This year, take action in the areas you find yourself caring about, and allow those experiences to inform your posture, your opinions, your passion.

Empathy, over time, spurs meaningful action. Such action will often mysteriously humble and empower, reinforcing empathy and strengthening your connections to others in your communities. What a wonderful way to spend a year.

resolving for empathy

Tis the season for resolutions.  Rather than thinking about what we hope to accomplish in the New Year, I want to suggest we acknowledge what we will see in the year ahead. With presidential primaries beginning, we can expect pointing fingers, totalizing stereotypes, and nationwide eyerolling to increase. With our addiction to smart phones and social media, we can expect habitual distractedness, flaring insecurities and performed but disappointing experiences of belonging. With our refusal to have meaningful dialogue about society’s ethical commitment to nurture life, we will continue to put people to death, to have mass and accidental shootings, and to watch unplanned pregnancies lead to desperate abortions or devastating familial situations. With problem fatigue and rising apathy, we will continue to see widening achievement, opportunity and income gaps. With our limited capacity for authenticity or discomfort, we will continue to be saddened by broken relationships.

Forgive the negative tone as we put champagne on ice. These scenarios are coming for us, but we don’t have to surrender to them.

Hope is a wonderful thing, and resolutions stem from the idea that we are better than our past behavior suggests, that we are capable of change, that inertia is not stronger than our will power. In my observation, negativity can run high as the year closes out, but optimism abounds as the ball drops. How many times did you hear, “I am ready for 2019 to end” in the past month? We’ll forget these sentiments of defeat this week as we look to 2020 with hope that we are not victims of our own lives, doomed to repeat disappointing outcomes.

Our hope stems from the will to survive, an instinct placed in us by our Creator. We long for health, we resist injustice, and we need to belong because we were created to hope. Our lives are spent in the tension between acquiescing to the frustration of reality and our will to change, to improve, to reform. As 2020 dawns, I’d like to suggest we cannot find hope without a humble reckoning with our reality. The scenarios we know to expect in the New Year are nationwide; they are also extensions of our personal apathy, greed, cynicism and stubbornness. Our country didn’t find dysfunction without our help

In light of this, I’d like to suggest we collectively resolve to nurture empathy in the New Year.

The healing power of empathy cannot be overstated, primarily because of the way it positions us in relationships. Empathy requires us to acknowledge we belong to the ‘we,’ that we share humanity. So much of our American cultural framework rests on our individual desire and work. After all, the last 2 words in All American are the words I CAN, to quote a ridiculous song I learned as a kid. Empathy offers us a larger context in which to place our own stories of striving. Strive away! Work hard! But remember this year that you do so as one of many; each of us struggle between success and failure. If this is true then it becomes impossible for us to diminish or belittle the struggle of another. Empathy reminds us that we belong to each other.

The secret weapon of empathy is that it leads to frequent forgiveness. Full disclosure, I think forgiveness is the answer to all of it. Necessary to live well with others, relationships have hope when we first nurture a posture of forgiveness toward ourselves.  In the last week, I’ve noticed the incredible power of forgiveness to heal people I love. I saw a woman racked with guilt as she reflected that she had “blown Christmas Eve” for her family. She lost sight of the moment, of who she was, of what her kids needed, and she regretted it. We shared a holy moment as she realized she was worthy of forgiveness and could be gentle with herself; indeed, she required self-forgiveness before she could heal and live differently with her family.

If we cultivate a posture of forgiveness within, it will soon flow into others. This week one of my nephews broke a bowl but did not clean it up. The next morning our daughter cut her foot on a broken piece. I watched as he apologized to his hurting cousin. Several of us freely forgave him, reminding him that we all make mistakes. But then, in a Christmas miracle kind of moment, I saw him approach my husband. He shared a memory that had just resurfaced: When the boy was a toddler, my husband had also left a mess where the boy had gotten hurt. As the boy’s actions had hurt his daughter, so my husband had hurt him a decade earlier. I watched my giant husband bend down to hold his face in his hands and say, “I have been exactly where you are, and you are forgiven. We belong together.”

What a gorgeous reminder of the power to forgive. All the adults nearby teared up as we realized this is the gift we have to offer one another. Transforming our lives is less about our lofty goals for 2020, less about the insufficiencies we need to bolster, less about our deficits. This year we have the chance to embrace and cultivate a skill we carry innately: the ability to access empathy in a way that leads to forgiveness of self and of others. Such free forgiveness, born out of empathy, will strengthen our connectedness to and interdependence on one another. Resolve to remember you are one of many as the New Year dawns, and watch hope rise.

Empathy makes us responsible for words uttered and actions completed in our presence. Next week, more on that.

I want that! (No, I don't...)

Sunday mornings, for parents who also go to church, can be the worst. These mornings often involve grumpy children, yelling parents, and breaking speed limits. Exacerbating the delays, the tension, the meanness, is often a subtle despair that Sunday mornings should not be like this!! On the way to church, for goodness’ sakes!

And yet, things are often not like they ought to be. My family’s Sunday tradition involves getting donuts on the way to church. Yes, it unfortunately means having to leave earlier, but yes, it also means no breakfast making is required, so it’s a win overall. A few years ago my kids were on the trampoline, in pjs, wrestling, on Sunday morning. I, using my I’m-an-amazing-mom-gently-reminding-you-that-we-need-to-leave-soon voice, calmly yelled out the back door that if they wanted donuts we had to leave in ten. 

“We do! We do want donuts!”  Wrestle-mania continued.

Three minutes went by. Still wrestling.

“Hey savage ones! If you want donuts get in here and get dressed!”

“We do! We do want donuts!” More Bouncing. More wrestling.

Three more minutes went by.

“You have lost your everloving minds if you think I’m getting you donuts if we are not pulling out of this driveway in 3 minutes. “  Less gentle. Less amazing.

“We do! We do want donuts!”

“Really? Cause I can’t tell AT ALL. You say you want donuts but you are doing NONE OF THE THINGS REQUIRED to get donuts. At some point you have to move your bodies toward your closets if you actually, in fact, want donuts. You can’t just keep saying it while performing pile drivers on each other.”

And just like that, 4 little bodies tumbled out of the netting, onto the grass, up to their closets, and into the car. Donuts received, along with tardy slips from Jesus.

As we slide into 2019, there are lessons here for us. Like children—especially when it’s resolution time—we wholeheartedly claim to want things we have no intention of pursuing. The kids adamantly asserted their desire for pastries, but really they just wanted to play. Last week I suggested we do the self-reflection required to tell the truth in the new year. If we want to share meaningfully engaged lives with others, we must work to stop our subtle practice of defending ourselves, seeing only our best intentions, and revising history to make ourselves seem noble in every encounter.

Extending that thought, it is helpful to recognize that we often say we want certain realities in our lives without taking steps to realize them. Some examples are easy:

We say we want to be healthy, but we like Doritos more than running.

We say we want a good night’s sleep, but we drink too much or watch TV late into the night.

We say we want to be less busy, or to have less distracted kids, but we overcommit everyone we care for without blinking an eye.

We want to be people who read, but we pick up a book and then pick up an iphone…and then an hour disappears.

For the next few weeks I’d like to slow the tape for us, offering time to think about how we talk about the things we hope for.  Approaching middle age, it is easy to imagine one day looking back on a few decades of failed attainment. I never got the rhythm of rest and work down. I never got my kids to put their phones down. I never got the whole family dinner made at home thing to work. I never had the relationships I wanted with my neighbors.

My fear is that this narrative of failure is coming for all of us, and rather than understanding how we got here, we will revise history to make ourselves seem disciplined and intentional, while painting our dreams as idealistic or impossible. In other words, we will easily assume we all live in a circle of failure because it is too hard to be the people we hope to be. We tried, and repeated for years that we hoped for X. Since X never happened, it must be that X is impossible.

Our tendency to assume our unrealized hopes are impossible is another way we lie to ourselves. For instance, I talk and teach a LOT about neighboring. This is a clunky word, but it conveys the idea that we want to care well for the people we know. We literally want to be good neighbors to our neighbors. We want to be people and have people to call in a pinch. We want to share meals and watch babies and walk dogs. Nevertheless, for many of us, we say we want this while we actively chose our own agendas at the expense of those very relationships.

 For years, I said I wanted to be a good neighbor. However. When a knock came at an inopportune time, or when a never-ending chat in the yard made dinner late, or when being outside somehow beckoned a visit, or when a big party landed cars in my space or noise in my ears, I got annoyed. Without realizing it, I longed for friends-like-family neighbors while actively avoiding such relationships. The truth is that I only wanted amazing neighbors when I needed a favor, or on the one night a year when communal grilling and cocktailing seemed like all I ever wanted in life. I said I wanted to be a good neighbor while sort of hating all the things neighboring requires.

Alas, our capacity for hypocrisy is enormous. We will spend a few weeks here examining the dreams to which we aspire. For now, pay attention to the oft-repeated hopes of your frustrated soul and then examine the ways you approach or fail to approach those hopes. I suspect our problem is not that our dreams are out of reach, but that we fail to understand all that they require. Do not abuse the dream because you lack the stamina to realize it.