Depending how you squint
I spent election day working the polls at a precinct in Anoka County, Minnesota.
My job, from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., was helping people feed their ballots into the ballot counting machine. There were elderly white couples, nurses in their scrubs, Muslim women in hijabs, one mystifyingly angry blonde lady, a friendly guy in camo, a few folks with American flag masks, people with walkers, people with babies, a handful of Black high school seniors, elderly folks in passenger seats filling out ballots in their adult children’s cars.
I teared up multiple times, taking it all in. Every one of these people was doing their minuscule part, and it was all going to add up to...something.
Who voted how? I couldn’t tell you.
I have a few guesses. Some were fairly obvious. With many more I wouldn’t have been shocked if you told me they voted either way. I could see the potential for both, depending on how I squinted, what you told me to focus on.
Gender? Race? Class? Age? Health? Their willingness to make eye contact? Their personal aura of cheerfulness or inflammation?
Each one of us is a bundle of overlapping data points, visible and invisible. And we’re constantly rearranging them into narratives, explaining ourselves to ourselves, extrapolating conclusions about others.
On election day, millions of individuals made a tiny contribution at precincts around the country, and in the end it added up to something. A new way forward for the collective.
There’s a story I love. It’s about a social worker in New York City named Julio Diaz.
One night as he was getting off the subway, a teenager robbed him at knife-point, demanding Diaz’s wallet. Diaz gave it to him, and as the kid was walking away, Diaz called him back to take his coat as well, figuring he must be cold.
Then he asked the kid if he was hungry, and invited him to dinner. The kid accepted. They sat together at the diner and talked. At the end of the meal Diaz reminded the kid that he had his wallet, so he’d have to pay for dinner. The kid gave Diaz his wallet back, and Diaz paid for the meal and gave the kid $20. Then Diaz asked the kid for his knife. The kid handed it over.
In his essay Building a Peace Narrative, writer Charles Eisenstein suggests that the way we see people — the stories we tell ourselves about them — are actually invitations. He writes:
“Julio was able, even with a knife in his face, to see something else. He held the teenage mugger in a story of, who knows, ‘A troubled young man with a good heart’ so strongly that the mugger was helpless to resist. That is the power of the stories that we hold about each other.”
But to open ourselves to new stories, we have to be willing to give up the benefits we get from the one that goes like this: "Me GOOD, you BAD."
Righteousness can be addictive. Projecting badness onto an "other" makes it easier to separate it from the tender center of our own hearts, cast it out, disown it, and condemn it. It also hardens a fluid, multidimensional story of possibility into a flat, static cartoon frame of battle and resistance.
Remember those 3D posters from the 90s, where you had to soften your gaze and change your focus to see the image hiding in the pixels? What if it's as simple as that?
The way we see each other is an invention, an incantation, an invitation — one that can shift depending on how we squint, what we decide to focus on.
The week before the election my husband and I drove through the rural expanses of Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas. Trump signs everywhere, lining the interstate, bedecking homes and shops and farms.
We were working from an Airbnb in Ruidoso, New Mexico. One morning a friendly couple waved to us from their front porch as we were walking our dog Wabi through the neighborhood. We chatted for a while. They were visiting from Lubbock, Texas, and they’d brought their Trump yard sign along to display proudly at their vacation rental. They were entranced by Wabi (they once had a 3-legged dog of their own) and insisted that we come over that night to sit on their porch and have a drink.
Now, you could live in Minnesota for seven years before someone would invite you to their house. And here these folks were inviting us over within five minutes of our meeting. We politely declined (A. There’s a pandemic and B. We were hitting the road at 6 a.m. the next day) but I was so struck by their openness, their invitation to connect. I wish we had been able to do it.
Even before the pandemic, it felt like opportunities to spend in-person time with people of different political persuasions were diminishing. Now, with our pandemic-mandated isolation, it seems they’ve disappeared entirely.
Now all we see are the signs from the road, the colors on the map, groups of protestors facing off from across the street, the most incendiary social media posts amplified by algorithms, the stories and profiles the media choose to highlight, the data points they opt to magnify.
It's getting harder to see the 3-legged dogs or the twinkling eyes or the unexpected ways we might overlap — the things that can scramble the narrative, open it back up to realms of possibility.
There is imaginative, generative work ahead. For those of us on the political left, the task is no longer resistance, but progress.
How do we bring along as many people as possible? How do we issue invitations? Stop reducing each other to the most cartoonishly villainous personas we can conjure up?
What will it take to let go of the addictive delusion that we’re on a holy and righteous team doing battle against forces of pure evil? (Which, by the way, is the prevailing narrative on the other side as well.)
How do we shake the snow globe, let our trillions of data points float and dance and drift? Bust 'em out of the calcified identities and narratives that seem so immutable?
I’m not naive enough to think that Lindsay Graham and Mitch McConnell will suddenly become pliant and cooperative if we give them our wallets and coats. I'll leave it to the sages and saints to figure out how to deal with those guys.
But I think the millions of Americans who elected them — some of them anyway — may be more open than we think to new stories and visions, especially if we let ourselves be too.
On the left we talk about “doing the work,” usually referring to the work of unlearning and dismantling white supremacy. That is critical work. But I think there’s more.
There’s also the work of unclenching, of softening toward the parts of ourselves we resist and shame — our own fragility and aggression, our own selfishness and fear. There's the work of finding peace and wholeness in our own minds, which is the first step toward it manifesting in the collective.
What we know for sure is that when a lot of us show up, one by one, and do the work, it adds up to something. It adds up to a new way forward.
Brain Food
I loved this podcast interview between Dr. Mark Hyman of the Cleveland Clinic and Wim Hof, a.k.a. "The Ice Man," on how breathing techniques and cold water therapy are free, accessible tools with transformative potential for our health and happiness. I've downloaded Wim Hof's app and have started doing the breathing exercises and adding 30-second cold blasts at the end of my showers. WHY NOT?
Speaking of breathing, we listened to Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor on Audible while driving 2,300 miles around the country in late October. I'm not all the way through it yet, but it's pretty darn fascinating so far.
One of my favorite recent discoveries is Hamama, a microgreens kit that lets you grow fresh, nutrient-packed microgreens on your kitchen counter all winter long. I'm on my third seed quilt so far. Bring on the immunity-supporting phytonutrients!
Thanks for reading! If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can subscribe here. Feel free to use the buttons below to share it with your networks.