Showing up
Little actions on the way to bigger results
“Doing the smallest next right thing is hard AF, but sometimes that’s all we got,” I heard Brene Brown say on one of her podcasts (or was it a Nexflix special?) recently. I haven’t followed the academic phenom’s work that closely, but her work on vulnerability and courage seems that much more relevant these days. I had her special playing the other night as I was folding a bunch of one-page zines for the GGRO volunteer celebration.
Saying yes to doing a lot of smallish things had made for another marathon of doing, culminating in this past weekend’s menu of two gigs and one museum tour with a yoga class, a Buddhist meeting and a protest thrown in for good measure. I don’t know if they were all the best right things, but action generally feels better than paralysis. Yes, they took effort, and some logistical planning and in the case of the rally, time and space that may have been used differently, but on this particular day, they didn’t feel hard. (It also helped that I had Monday mostly off so I could rest!)
Sally and I went to the Alameda-edition of the Hands Off! rally, standing on the sidewalk and reading all the fun signs that people had constructed. Our rally was plagued by an inadequate PA, so we mostly couldn’t understand the speakers very well, but we cheered along with the crowd regardless. A young boy behind us was fired up: “Stop the train!” he yelled a couple of times, his dad coaching him a bit to add “of lies” or "of cuts.”
The crowd spilled over the City Hall corner and to the other points of the intersection. We found Janet and Jeff standing across the street under a tree with another group of protesters and she showed me her customizable signboard: her message could be changed as needed. Today it read: “Protect the Constitution.”
What I didn’t budget for last weekend was time to make my own sign, so I wore my trusty Jaimee Harris ‘Listen to Women’ sweatshirt over my ‘No Going Back’ T-shirt picked up at a Harris event in the fall. The sweatshirt reads:
Listen to Folk
Listen to Punk
List to Rap
Listen to Women
Of course, we wouldn’t be in this mess if we had listened to women in the first place, but here we are! Throughout the rally, I got a series of nods and thumbs up for my sweatshirt’s message, mostly from other women. As the rally was winding down and those who were going to march down Park St. started to move in another direction, a man stopped in front of me and proceeded to tell me he “trusted maybe 70% of women.” Then he gave me an earful about his angry mother and how he had to protect his siblings as my friends stood around me agog.
“I have a lot more compassion for our mothers’ when I think of the oppression their generation had to deal with,” I said when I was able to get a word in. I don’t know how my mom’s anger stacked up against this stranger’s, but in hindsight, I totally understood where she was coming from. My guess is his mom had also grown up in the 1950s when women’s rights were close to nil (abelit they could vote!). He didn’t seem to know how to (or want to!) respond to that line of thinking, and moved off into the crowd. I wondered whether he had withheld his vote for Harris because of his experience.
“I’d like to apologize for men,” I heard another male voice say behind me. He’d overheard the man’s plaint as well.
That was nice of him, but I didn’t really need his apology either. I was glad all the people were there, even the wounded dude. I’ve been stuck in less-than-helpful thought patterns at numerous times in my life, which in some ways is behind my practice of acting when I can these days. I agree with Brown that small right actions are what we have. And they add up, create momentum. Which is why its that much more important for everyone to keep showing up.
The next National Day of Action is April 19.