Against Panic: A Survival Kit

The people in communities most imperiled by that fever have known this truth from the beginning. I’m embarrassed that it took me so long to give up my own naïve hope for a return to “normal.” What this election has made absolutely, indisputably clear should have been clear to me all along: I will be fighting for the rest of my life to preserve the promise this country still holds for pluralism, for fairness, for decency, for true freedom. I am never going to breathe a sigh of relief. What choice is there but to fight?

To give everything we have to the cause of keeping American democracy alive, if only long enough for another generation to have the chance to fight for it, is nothing less than a moral obligation. As Adrienne Johnson Martin, editorial director of the nonprofit news site MLK50, wrote last week in a newsletter to subscribers, “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t wrong: The long arc of the moral universe still bends toward justice. The weight of the work helps it bend.”

During the last six days, plenty of writers have been analyzing the data, coming up with theories for why the guy I passed leaving the restaurant on Election Day was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words, “I’m with the felon.” I have my theories, too, but I don’t want to write about them. They aren’t needed now.

I want to write instead about grief. I want to find words for how the only thing that ever comes close to touching the solitude of grief is tenderness. There is no cure for profound grief, but beauty and love and tenderness can walk alongside it and ease the solitude at least.

For me, beauty looks like walking in the rainy woods. Love looks like the company of good friends. Tenderness looks like a novel that captures the full, complex range of human experience. (My new favorite is “Time of the Child” by the Irish novelist Niall Williams, which will be published in this country next week. It is a study in human community that made me laugh out loud and remember how to love even the people who cause others so much suffering, and especially those who come together to ease it.)

To fight the calamities that are coming, we will need to find what gives us joy even amid the fight, and we will need to find a way to rest when the fight is too much to bear. To allow the braying winners to turn us into desolate, impotent shadows with stones forever lodged in our throats would be to let them win even more surely than they won at the ballot box last week.

So for me there will be more watchful stillness. More walks in the woods to watch the still heron standing one-legged in the shallows; to watch the still deer, waiting to see if I mean them harm; to watch the stillness of the red-eared sliders, resting on the sunny log, and the stillness of the wood duck, whose stillness is on the surface only; to linger in the stillness of the lake itself, a perfect mirror giving back the sky.

There will be more books and more poetry and more time with friends and more afternoons sitting on a bench and watching the leaves fall. I will be fighting with all that I am, but I will also be reminding myself again and again not to wait for the world to give me a reason to sigh with relief. I will give myself respite. I will remember not to keep waiting for sweetness and rest to arrive on their own.

“If it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all,” Shakespeare wrote in “Hamlet.” I’ll remember that, too.

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