This loss too is personal

This is the time to act. We have a gazillion ways to say this. “The rainy day is now.” “You are the hero you are waiting for.” “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.” “If not now, when?”

For me, a favorite has always been this Rosa Luxemburg quote from 1918: “The process may seem rather more tedious than one had imagined it at first. … Who among us cares about the time, who worries, so long only as our lives suffice to bring it to pass?”

What I like about it is the recognition of tedium and time. The acknowledgement that change takes time, that the process is lifelong.

Truth is, I am feeling overwhelmed. It is not just the violence in Israel and Palestine, carrying with it the memory of all the other violences, all the other times, the decades-old roots of exclusion. This time is different, because it is now, because we hurt now, deeply, agonizingly. But it has tentacles that reach so far back I can’t even tell which ones are real. History is famously written by the victors and I don’t know who they are.

And yet, it is not just that.

It is the arrest of peaceful protesters and voices for change everywhere. It is the deliberate attack on those who seek to keep themselves safe by uprooting their families: the displaced, migrants, refugees. It is anti-Black systemic exclusion. It is the continued and casual violence against women and trans folks, anyone deemed “other” because of what we look like or believe. And in the philanthropic world, where I spend most of my working hours, it’s the insistence that we somehow sit outside of this morass, that we see the threads more clearly, that there is something of value in saving our resources and selves for the next rainy day. As if something worse is always to come, and we better not have wasted our energy on what is now.

This work is tedious. I know. It is filled with obstacles and challenges, and it hurts. But this is what it takes: head out of the sand, sitting in the grief, slowly unraveling the centuries of not-feeling, of ignoring our shared humanity and the earth who holds us.

“You are tired. But everyone’s tired. But no one is tired enough,” writes Galway Kinnell in another favorite about personal loss.

This loss too is personal, I remind myself. The work is not to lose ourselves.