#29: A Soft Retreat
Hey there. Hello again. Been a minute, hasn’t it. To be honest, I had two letters geared up and ready to go over the past six weeks, but I couldn’t bring myself to hit send for a variety of reasons I’m not exactly proud of, not the least of which was a feeling of utter impotence when it came to contributing something insightful to the emergent conversation about race and privilege.
I don’t want to make excuses; I believe in the utility and the morality of engaging in public discourse. However, I’ve been less sure about what good it does to shout into the echo chamber. I’m certainly not the only person making this argument, and it’s easy to point out that any echo chambers tend to be a construction of our own unconscious biases, and that’s obviously part of the problem in the first place. Noted.
Still, instead of writing some virtue-signaling newsletter or social media posts, I might have actually participated in meaningful action, like attending a protest as a show of solidarity or sending money to bail funds. But I haven’t. I’ve done exactly nothing but the bare minimum of paying attention and it’s shameful. I’m not fishing for empathy here, I’m just being honest, which continues to help no one but myself.
I’ll tell you what I did do though. I went on a retreat. Not literally, because I’ve barely left my neighborhood, much less my house since mid-March. No, I've unplugged from social media and to a certain extent, social life itself, and cordoned myself in my office for ten or so hours each day, where I have been learning how to read, how to write, and how to think critically. I wouldn’t say I’m starting from scratch here, but I would say that I feel like I’m just getting started.
A few years ago I was working with a coach who posed the following question: What are the things you always do? In context, she was asking about my work habits and rituals, like, how do I start projects or how do I approach transitions–that sort of thing. Answering this was incredibly illuminating at the time, when it helped me to find the connections between the things I like to do with the things I get paid to do. But beyond just improving the keywords on my CV, this question has proved over and over to be one of the most useful and productive reflections I’ve ever encountered. If we understand our patterns, we have much more agency to repeat the ones that work for us, and eliminate the ones that get us stuck or lead to dead ends.
Seeking out education is a thing I always do, especially in the moments when my ability to take action is hampered by a lack of direction. When I feel lost, unmoored, or stagnant, learning helps me clear the fog and find some lucidity again. And I’ve been staggering through a pretty dense fog lately, given the triple-whammy of giving up my bagel business, a global pandemic, and witnessing the unraveling of democracy from abroad. I mean, can anyone see more than two feet in front of themselves at this point?
Here is where you might expect me to tell you about my deep-dive into an eye-opening curriculum that’s changed how I see and understand my complicity in systemic racism. Unfortunately, I am not– it’s not that I don’t think it’s necessary, it absolutely is–but because there’s some other work I need to do first in order to make engaging with that knowledge more valuable in the long run, at least for myself and my own objectives.
If you’re interested, or have just been waiting patiently for me to get to the point (I always get there, don’t I?!), then I’ll tell you that specifically, what I’ve been studying is creative writing and critical theory. I really wasn’t kidding before when I said I was learning to read, write, and think again. If this seems ridiculous or frivolous, even, I assure you, it’s not. It’s fucking hard, humbling work and I love it.
But if you’re looking for eye-opening, it’s this quote from Toni Morrison that inspired me to follow this path:
This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence.
Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.
I’m not so naïve to try and convince either you or even myself that, say, being able to write a critical essay is on equal footing with other, more hands-on measures of activism and allyship. But I think it’s a start, and all I can do is get back to work and try to write my way forward.
You’ve heard me say this before:
Ancora imparo–I am still learning.
Thumbnail image by artist Kehinde Wiley