Making Peace With The War Within You
Link Love + being the 60%
I have forever been trying to make peace with myself.
When people reflect who I am to them back to me, they use words like peace, calm, warm, safe. When I reflect back to myself, I use words like twisted, factions, unrest, angst, and turmoil. The serene duck on water, feet churning furiously below, comes to mind.
The most I have ever identified with a sitcom character was when Chidi from The Good Place says to Eleanor, “You know the sound a fork makes when it gets stuck in the garbage disposal?” She nods. He continues, “That’s the sound my brain makes all the time.”
I have known people who do not live with this internal tempest within them, those who receive life as either a gift or a curse, with little variation between the two. Or those for whom faith comes easy or politics come clear, where the world functions for them in black and white, good and evil, dark and light. I don’t mean to say their lives are without friction, I only mean to say the inward battle is not a constant for them, it’s an occasional.
In weeks like these, when 40% of my fellow Americans are screaming across the void and if you’re not screaming with their same intensity and persuasion, you’re not doing enough, I remind myself again of the 60% of the rest of us:
Those for whom protest is equal parts shoveling the walks of our neighbors, holding new babies next to their big brothers, donating to the food pantry, making soup for new friends, hugging someone who needs it, saying what hurts right out loud so it can be safe for others to say their hurt aloud too. I think of a local friend who bikes everywhere and another one who walks everywhere. I think of a friend who begins a job as a pastor soon and another one who ended his tenure pastoring recently and faithfully. I think of people who write poetry and make art and leave voice-messages and heart text messages and call when they have twenty minutes of quiet. I think of mothers and fathers and daughters and sons, and the motherless, fatherless, estranged, or alone. I think about all the calls we all made to congresspeople these past few weeks. I think of the immigrants down the street and the ones in the city food court, making our food with cheer. I think about our friends making a bookstore on the corner of Orange and Prince. This too, I remind myself, is revolution. This too is protest.
The dominant feeling in me lately is one of unrest. It is the opposite of calm, the opposite of warmth, it is rage, rage. It is a litany of we told you sos and when is enough, enough? It is anger, precise and pointed. But, though dominant, it wars with what is beautiful still, with what is growing and alive and good, truly good in the world. It is what my friend Shannan Martin calls, “A counterweight.” It refuses to ignore the evil but equally refuses to make evil the point.
I have been trying to make peace with myself my entire life, to stop the warring factions, to unite the disparate parts, to bring together the dark and light, to soften the hard edges, to mesh the extremes, to remind myself and others that we are not the worst of what we see in the world, but actually the best.
But the older I get, the more I wonder if this is my whole work in the world, and I do mean whole. I wonder if a willingness to go to war with the sides I see is where my wholeness comes. That without that churning within me, I would not be me and would not have work to do. That in order to be faithful, I must continue to churn my feet below the surface, embrace the fork in its endless grind, fight with myself in order that when I open my mouth, write my words, say my things, I am one less person fighting with you.
Link Love is one of the ways I try to counterweight in my work. Below you’ll find links to articles, books, documentaries, podcasts, and projects I loved lately. These are, as always, behind a paywall. Consider joining Sayable and getting a glimpse at what’s helping me counterweight my world.
