Of work and healing
Let's keep reading, writing, remembering, and leaving tracks.
During an after-dinner conversation in 2006, my 8-year-old son asked who had won the presidential election of 2000. His dad and I exchanged a look, and I said that it probably depended upon who you asked.
We found ourselves explaining the electoral college system and how the result came down to the vote in a state in which the governor was the President’s brother, and the vote was decided by judges who were aligned in various ways with his political party. We talked about hanging chads, and how it all meant that the person who had won the most votes in the country as a whole did not win the election.
“Oh,” he said when we were done. “That sounds like some other thing that happened. Some water thing.”
His dad and I were quiet, stumped by whatever connection he was making.
“You know,” he said. “A thing where someone broke a law to get someone elected.”
More silence from us.
“Do you mean Watergate?” I finally asked, thinking that, of course he couldn’t mean Watergate. He was only 8 and was born 24 years after Nixon’s resignation.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, excited that I’d understood.
“How do you know about Watergate?” I asked. He told us he’d read about it in a book in the school library.
“Well, this was different in important ways,” I said. “No laws were broken.”
But norms were, and in that, my son was perhaps seeing something I hadn’t yet.
Heidi Lasher, in her recent Orion essay “What Happens When We Stop Remembering?” explains the concept of shifting baselines:
“SHIFTING BASELINES is the idea that each successive generation will accept as “normal” an increasingly degraded and disorganized ecology, until at some point in the future, no one will remember what a healthy ecology looks and feels like. Absent any personal or societal accounting of migrating butterflies, winter snowfall, or spawning salmon, future generations will have tolerated so many small losses in population, abundance, and habitat that eventually they won’t know what they’re missing. Worse, they may not even care.”
Lasher is writing about a biological concept, but don’t our societal systems also have a kind of ecology? How many losses in our electoral norms and processes have we weathered in just my lifetime? How many of us now accept as normal our “increasingly degraded and disorganized” political and governmental systems? And with them, of our ways of relating to and caring for each other?
My introduction to politics came from Watergate, when I was 8 years old, which culminated in the President’s resignation. That the President would resign over covering up a break-in to his opposition’s election headquarters now feels a bit quaint/unreal, when today’s Republican nominee is facing 91 counts over 4 indictments and there’s no dispute over his sexual abuse of at least one woman. Still, I do remember a time when such a thing happened. I remember that our systems worked to reveal the actions of a President who covered up a crime, and he resigned because his violation of political norms caused him to lose support within his own party, something almost unimaginable today.
How did our baseline shift so far, so quickly? And how long will it be before no one remembers when a president resigned in disgrace, with regret, and because “the interest of the Nation must always come before any personal considerations”?
My children have long known that summer vacations were not the reason I became a teacher. I told them more than once that in my teaching program application essay, I wrote that I wanted to become a teacher because of my belief that a well-educated populace was the key to a healthy democracy. I told them I believed that if more of us were better able to understand how language is used to create and shape reality, we would not be taken in by the kind of slick, shallow rhetoric so skillfully used by Ronald Reagan, the so-called Teflon president who dominated my formative political years. I told them I knew that I alone wasn’t going to preserve democracy, but I had faith that if enough of us were doing this important work, collectively we would make the difference I hoped we would.
Yes, I was that earnest. That idealistic. That naive. That steeped in the values and worldview of my post-World War II parents and grandparents (some Republican, some Democrat) who’d taught me that right would prevail if we all worked hard enough for it. Who wouldn’t want to believe in that?
I left the classroom in 2009 with hopes of increasing my sphere of influence by becoming a school librarian. While I studied to add that specialization to my teaching license, I became an instructional coach, working to support teachers in developing their literacy instruction. Eventually I became a district librarian, overseeing the library program for 10 schools, K-12.
As one boss characterized it, I became a “change agent,” laboring to shift paradigms, policies, and practices in deeply entrenched, wildly under-resourced systems meant to serve a rapidly-changing society.
It was, for me, soul-breaking work.
“You know, Rita,” a colleague once said, “you think that if you just explain things well enough, people will do what’s right, but that’s not the problem. It’s that they don’t want to. Not everyone wants what you want, and it’s not because you haven’t been clear or they don’t understand.”
When Trump won in 2016, my son—a young man who as a boy connected dots between Watergate and the election of 2000—jokingly asked, “How does it feel to see the failure of your life’s work?” (#funnynotfunny)
It never occurred to me, when I was his age, that people knew exactly what Reagan was saying and doing and that they liked him because of it. That the problem wasn’t a lack of skills, but a lack—or presence—of something else.
As we began to emerge from the pandemic, I realized that working in public education was breaking not just my mental health, but my physical health as well. I was eligible for full retirement, and I needed out.
I told myself:
I’ve done my time. I’ve made my contributions. I have fought the good fight for more than three decades. It’s time for younger folks to take over.
I told myself it was OK for me to step back, go home, and live out the rest of my days focused on taking care of myself, calling it enough to do good by living in ways that minimize harm to others.
Hadn’t I earned that?
“I’m a writer with a chronic illness, I sit in my room, peck at my keys, hope someone will read my words. I occasionally make people smile. I occasionally write work that makes people feel less alone. I occasionally write poems that expose the injustices wrought by the press. None of this seems enough.”
Kathryn Anna Marshall, “Writing While the World Burns”
In January, when I moved my writing away from a Wordpress blog to Substack, I embraced it as a chance to shift focus. I hoped to write about finding meaning and contentment from living a “small, creative life.” I did not want to write about any of the larger issues swirling around it. I did not want to write long essays about complex questions for which I have no clear answers.
Last week, I read a post from a writer doing the kind of writing I thought I wanted to, sharing glimpses of a life in which she finds comfort and meaning in the small things: a cup of tea, a morning ritual, a lit candle.
I, too, find comfort and meaning in such things and believe we should all take all the comfort we can get, but while reading her soothing words I felt such an anger rise up in me. There was no context for the tea, the ritual, the candle. There was no acknowledgement of why we are so in need of comforts or of what makes her small, cozy life possible or of how out of reach such a life is for so many people in the world.
(One day this week, as I entered a fast-food restaurant to pick up a meal for my daughter, I passed a young man standing near the establishment’s doors. He was thin, dirty, and clearly cold. He reminded me in important ways of my son, who is probably about the same age. We made eye contact and I smiled, but I walked past him without saying anything. As I left with a bag full of food, we made eye contact again, and he asked me if I had any money.
“I don’t,” I said, “but would you like some food?” He nodded, and when I asked what he would like, his preference was for the meal I’d just purchased for my daughter. I handed the bag to him and went back inside to buy the same food again, thankful I could do so, thankful my children are in different circumstances, and full also with grief and rage that this kind of encounter has become normal in my community.)
I wasn’t so much angry with that writer as with all the terrible and threatening things happening that I cannot ignore, much as part of me would like to. I want it to be OK to write only about the comforts of tea and ritual and candles, when, as Kathryn Anna Marshall puts it, “Sometimes everything seems so big that all I can do is make something nice for dinner and watch the birds.”
But it’s not OK. As Marshall also notes, “Finding joy in the small things is not a get out of jail free card that allows me to ignore the big things.”
“I took a break from politics for a few months back there and I can’t deny I felt so much better. I relaxed. I looked around. There were things that delighted me. I found much to be grateful for.
I stayed away from the news and the pundits. I ignored the columns that would only make me angry. It was my break time, but I knew at some point I would have to get back to work.”
Ramona Grigg, “On Writing My Own Truth”
Like Ramona Grigg, I also felt so much better when I stopped paying close attention to the larger world in which my small, personal one spins. I wanted to believe what I told myself when I retired—that it’s OK for me to be on a permanent break. That it’s OK to allow myself to stay away from the news and the pundits, as long as I keep reasonably informed of what’s happening. That I don’t have to work at making the world better, especially when I don’t even know what work might mean—could mean—for me now. That it’s OK for me to let younger generations carry the mantle.
But, as I read Heidi Lasher’s meditation on climate change and memory, I couldn’t stop wondering if there have been so many degradations in our social ecology that too many of those who are younger don’t know what they’re missing, don’t know that there can be some other kind of normal possible. Don’t know that in spite of all the ways our country has fallen short and worked exactly as it was designed to, there is still something solid here we might build upon, rather than a wholly rotten foundation that should be burned to the ground.
Elizabeth Beggins, in her recent post, “All Clear. Are You Ready?” suggests a “simple and straightforward” solution “for those who sense that the time has come to do more.”
She advocates that we talk to each other, “respectfully and with a desire to learn,” and builds a case that doing so has the ability to have a positive impact on our country. She shares her belief that “if we open ourselves to the possibilities, we can continue to form a more perfect Union.”
Can it be that simple? Is that all I have to do? Exchange words with others?
Robert Jones, Jr., in a piece celebrating books to read in honor of Women’s History Month, recently pointed his readers to Toni Morrison’s powerful words about the purposes of art in challenging times:
“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
Of course, I am no Toni Morrison. Do the words—are they even art?—of a writer such as me make any difference? How can they possibly do the work of helping a civilization heal?
As I’ve wrestled with memories and texts and my own words in writing this essay, I’ve come to believe that I have likely spent much of my life asking the wrong questions about work and judging my labor by the wrong measures. Maybe I’m guilty of hubris, or maybe I am simply the typical product of a society that glorifies mythologies of exceptionalism and individualism.
Regardless, instead of asking
What difference can I make?
Am I doing enough?
How can I make ____ happen?
I probably should have been asking
What is true?
How can we best care for each other?
What am I built to do?
Here are some things that I know are true today:
We are living through a perilous time.
Sharing our truth and experience through language is a way of caring for each other.
I am built to “do language.”
Anything I might or might not do with language isn’t likely to change whatever is going to happen.
I’m coming to believe that a goal of bringing about a particular kind of world through our work with language is probably the wrong reason to teach or write or read or run libraries or have conversations. That kind of motivation too easily leads to silence—because the work too easily falls short of achieving what we hope it might—and with silence we lose our memories. We lose our history. We lose each other.
I’m coming to believe it’s a different kind of faith I need to cultivate now.
“Maybe a legacy is less about perpetuity and more about how the world responds to the tracks you leave. That it can be what connects one life to another, rather than declares, names for others, and keeps for itself. Something that reaches out to us from earlier times that leaves traces in our own pages, thoughts, bodies. Something that can exist for its own time for just a while before it seeps into the landscape.”
Freya Rohn, “To leave a trace”
Maybe the kind of writing that I—and so many other ordinary people like me—do in places like this are simply a way of having a conversation or of leaving tracks.
Maybe I can write things here that will help a few people remember, just a little longer, how life is now and how it once was. Maybe those people will pass on something from what I write, in different ways, to those they encounter. And in that way, no matter what our world and its societies evolve or devolve into, no matter that my particular words will have long faded into the ether, this work will become a conduit to memory, a kind of record of the past.
Maybe someone will remember, in part because of these words, that there was a time in which a president who lied about a crime had to leave office. That there was a time in which a girl born to working-class parents could afford to study at universities and buy a house and build a safe, comfortable, secure life from her work as a teacher. That part of what made that education and her resulting life possible was easy access to birth control, abortion, and divorce. That she could one day retire from that work and spend the last quarter of her life filling her days with small, simple creative pursuits. That such a life was possible because she was never brutalized by war and never knew hunger, widespread violence, or homelessness. That such a life was possible for more people than it was not.
Maybe the stories I write here will become the stuff of future fairy tales or myth. Maybe a lasting work, the kind that heals a civilization, won’t be written by you or me or anyone living now, but by a great-granddaughter who, as a child, listened to stories from someone who was changed by these words, written in this time when so many people wrote and shared their words freely and safely. Maybe these words are the seeds of a crop that won’t be harvested for a hundred years.
Heidi Lasher tells us that, “The antidote to shifting baselines is found in our ability to pay attention and to call forth what once was.” It would be nice to think that the words I’m laying down here might counter shifts that frighten and threaten me, but that can’t be the reason I write them, for it might well be that they simply live and die here, leaving no tracks into the future at all.
I’m coming to believe that if they do, that is OK, too—because doing language is what I’m built to do, and because, despite my limitations, “I occasionally make people smile. I occasionally write work that makes people feel less alone,” and that is reason enough to keep doing it.
A note: The writers whose work contributed to this piece represent the full range of what it means to be a writer today, from the legendary Toni Morrison to those who, like me, publish primarily here, in small blogs that might reach only a few hundred readers. They are essayists, poets, novelists, journalists. In these past few weeks, as the news has been so dire that I’ve felt myself shutting down and retreating into small, dark spaces, their work has challenged me, comforted me, enlightened me, and kept me here, living and trying. I like to think that all of us who write are part of a collective, and although our combined work might not save the world (whatever that means), it might help save some of us who live in it. Certainly those of us living in it now. If it has some positive effect on those in the future, well: That’s just a bonus.
A few other writings that informed my thinking/feeling but didn’t make it into the essay:
“For the love of winter” by Antonia Malchik "(“Maybe we find our sharpest, brightest shards of humanity in loving most fiercely what we know will be lost.”)
“Sleeping birds are vulnerable” by Jeannine Ouellette (“On the landless rookery of Bird Island, some fifteen thousand birds huddle together at dusk and nod off in peace, fearless.”)
“You are not the problem” by Joshua P. Hill “…it’s time to see ourselves as part of a collective, as part of a bigger whole. Then it’s time to take action, together. We need each other and there’s no shame in that. In fact, there’s power in it.”)
If my thoughts spark some of your own, please share them in the comments. I like to think of these writings as an invitation to a conversation. I would especially love to know how you are managing to stay in the world and be OK in it. But really, I love to read any responses you have to my words.
If you like this post, maybe click on the heart ❤️ and/or share it? Doing those things helps more people see it. It also gives me encouragement to keep going. Think of it as throwing some metaphorical spare change into the hat of a street musician.
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Rita, this is a masterpiece. I am so grateful for the care and time and heart you’ve put into this essay. I have so much to say in response, but I am in sleepy mode before bed. Let me just say a couple things: I am totally with you on language and conversation like this as a vector for world-building, or perhaps I should say “rebuilding.” I believe that the kindness and connection we can experience in spaces like that can and does extend itself out into the world. I call my newsletter my “sneaky activism,” NOT because I want to push my opinions on anyone, but because I want to create a space for us to engage from a place of mutual trust and good will. I believe, as you do, that’s the bedrock of democracy. I also want to be sure you meet Karen Walrond (she’s on Substack), author of The Lightmaker’s Manifesto. I believe you will love it.
“That such a life was possible because she was never brutalized by war and never knew hunger, widespread violence, or homelessness. That such a life was possible for more people than it was not.”
I don’t know that we’ve ever lived in a country where that was possible for more people that it was not - certainly not a world. I know your politics couldn’t be more different, but the nostalgia of a place/time that was better than here reminded me (perhaps on purpose?) of the weaponized nostalgia of MAGA.
Inequity, power, and tribalism are as much as a part of the human condition as compassion, generosity, and community. (And possibly the whole system, not just the human one.) While our system is breaking, and that’s hard to witness, this system was built broken - maybe it’s time for it to break?
My brain has been a tangled knot of macro/micro thoughts on what we mistakenly hold precious so I fear this comes across as harsh in a way I don’t mean it to be. And it’s also possible my brain latched onto the wrong takeaway here.