How do we keep going? How do we put one foot in front of the other, over and over, moving toward an unnamed goal that somehow has a million hopeful and beautiful inner images to illustrate it on our internal vision board even though we can never fully pin it down?
How can we keep that focus when the world is burning all around us? We seem doomed to keep repeating the patterns of the past, the hatred and need to subjugate those deemed lesser, more expendable, worth only what can be extracted from those with more money and power and the right background and gender and skin tone.
How can I keep hope alive when I see the atrocities that humans perpetuate daily? So many of us look away, glad that it’s not us or those we love, turning back to our mundane daily issues that keep us from contemplating how close to ruin we are every day, both personal and planetary.
And how can I keep doing all the small things that mean a lot to me but nothing in the greater scheme without feeling like I’m betraying the world, ignoring what’s actually happening? How do I stand up and say “I have books for you; please buy them” when I know so many people begging for mutual aid just to keep their housing or pay medical bills or eat?
There’s no easy answer to these questions.
I ask myself these things every week, sometimes multiple times a week. I struggle over them. I am one small dot in this world, with no power or money and a failing body. What can I do?
I get loud. I advocate for people and things I want to support. I try to put my money where it’s most needed, not that I have enough to make a difference by any means. I’m struggling too. It’s not enough. It’s never enough.
I write stories where the answers come a little easier.
Not too easy. Never so easy that there’s not ethical dilemmas that must be wrestled with, and prices to be paid. But stories that are written to give us some hope, some magic to believe in, and characters with strength and morals and will that hopefully can inspire readers to do the same, even if it’s in small ways.
Is that enough? I don’t know. Probably not. Maybe I’m even a terrible person for offering hope at all. I don’t believe that–not usually–but today’s been a challenging day and I’m not sure I’m the good guy I want to be when I write stories like this.
But no, fuck that.
I am not one to give up. Even when my brain chemicals were telling me to do so every day, I fought back because I do believe that we can be better and do better, as my character Vali boldly asserts. All my characters take parts of my heart and my head and put them on the page to keep me going as well as you, because we all need that kind of hope.
We can’t give up. This is the only planet, the only people, the only existence we know for sure we’ll get.
2 thoughts on “How?”
You reminded me of why it’s important for me to keep doing the little things that I do. My son feels that I need to see a therapist because I I feel the need to go to board of elections meetings to make sure they try and give us as many days to early vote as possible. Sometimes I wonder how I raised someone to be so callous about politics, do not understand that for me, a very political person, the political is personal. That I feel to do nothing is to abandon all hope. I need to remember that just because he doesn’t see the need to go to meetings as important does not mean that they are not important. They are important to me.
You’re right, they ARE important. I just dropped off my ballot for MD primaries today, because every office, no matter how small, can make a difference with the right people involved.
I think that some people [maybe your son, maybe not] don’t really get how important it is to stay involved until the politics affect them immediately. That’s what it takes for it to be personal for them.
You and I? We’re not those people. It ALL is personal. We want everyone to be represented.