Shaken and stirred

Photo credit: Marianne Mollmann, 2025

Every morning, my mother walks her fledgling tomato plants from their night shelter in the dining room to the greenhouse. Every afternoon, she walks them back. The nights are too cold for them outdoors, even behind glass-walls, and besides, my mother tells me, the sprouts get sturdier from the gentle shaking of the walk. They need those daily jolts.

I think about all the ways in which we are jolted about by life, and how resilience is born of hardship. I think about the balance between having to be resilient to survive and learning to engage with discomfort. I think about trigger warnings and diversity and inclusion policies, and about how there are no absolutes. Some trigger warnings inadvertently seem to indicate that any level of discomfort is a “trauma,” which — as Jill Filipovic so expertly writes — ultimately doesn’t help us discover what needs to change or develop enough resilience to actually change it. Sometimes, we need to retreat to spaces where we can be brave or safe or unobserved, deliberately excluding those we can’t feel brave or safe around, not to exclude per se but to enable us to be more inclusive when we emerge.

There are conversations that we cannot have in silos. There are problems we won’t be motivated to solve until they make us uncomfortable. I have friends who insist on watching news coverage from outlets that justify genocide and discrimination, in order to see things from the outside. I hold their bravery as I sit this morning: I cannot do what they do. I need a minimum of values-alignment, I think to myself. To respect an opinion, I need to know it at least comes from a place of knowing we all deserve to live.

My mother cradles her tray of tomatoes as she transports them back and forth to the greenhouse. This is not a vigorous shaking, though it is enough to unsettle the soil. There can be no resilience without meaningful disturbance. There can be no growth without care.