The importance of joy and being fully fallably human in social justice work

It's all about balance!

If you can't give yourself permission to be human, and you can't extend that to other people, it's a good time to check in with yourself.

Sam Dylon Finch wrote a lovely twitter thread about his experience in social justice. He's been both an angry social justice warrior and a loving one.  More recently loving.  He talks about what changed here in this thread.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1174106626585874433.html?fbclid=IwAR3JnWadCJOgAPKFE0xjoOM8_C6qekc3qHMExhUHz_m0TIVhN2A4nq5had8

My favorite part is this:

Because dignity and care and kindness have to come from a genuinely loving place. And if you become too absorbed in righteousness & despair, and you don't balance it with the healing work that allows you to love on your people and see THAT as truly radical... you lose yourself.

— Sam Dylan Finch 🍓 (@samdylanfinch) September 18, 2019

Loving people is truly radical. It's ok to be mad, but it's also important to love.  Love is what helps us fight compassion fatigue.

Great writers and thinkers have been telling us how to do this for a long time. In his essay Return to Tipasa, Albert Camus says the same thing. He had found that love itself was drying up in his fight against the Nazis - and then - he returns to Tipasa (a place he had played in his youth).  He says,

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
― Albert Camus

So - in this never ending fight for justice always remember that what call us to fight - is love. And to paraphrase Camus again from his letter to a German friend - it is important - that as we fight for our truth (LOVE) that we take care not to destroy it with the very arms we use to defend it. 

Self Care in Divided Times

Pretty much every woman I speak to is stressed out. Really stressed out.  We are having trouble concentrating at work. We can’t seem to get work done in a timely manner. What’s up and how can we help ourselves?

It should come as no surprise to anyone that as a humanist – I really don’t like Trump. He scares me. Not only is he a bully that routinely dehumanizes people he disagrees with – he’s a bully, which means he also has autocratic dictatorial tendencies.  I happen to like democracy and human rights and things like that, so what this guy and his enablers might do to our democracy – has me worried.

Even if you like Trump, and many do, there are a lot of people who are just as worried about “liberals destroying America” as I am of Trump destroying America. And when you think about it, that’s a pretty sorry state of affairs. We are being played against each other by politicians and Putin. The solution to that is to remember we are all humans and not evil. We all pretty much want the same things.

But back to self care. Given our fear levels and stress levels and the need to safeguard all we hold near and dear, we need to engage in some serious self care. I don’t view self care as an abdication of my responsibilities to other. I view it as an important part of my activism.

By taking care of myself. By taking time to enjoy the little and big things in life. And yes, by getting on with the normalcy of life, I not only reduce my stress levels, I also remind myself what it is I am fighting for.

Albert Camus wrote and fought in WWII in Europe. He struggled to keep his humanity and to remember the humanity of the people he fought. And he wrote about his struggles to maintain a sense of beauty and humanity in himself during the struggles. His essay Return to Tipasa is about exactly this and I am linking to it here.  https://genius.com/Albert-camus-return-to-tipasa-annotated

“For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it. In the clamor in which we live, love is impossible and justice does not suffice. This is why Europe hates daylight and is only able to set injustice up against injustice. But in order to keep justice from shriveling up like a beautiful orange fruit containing nothing but a bitter, dry pulp, I discovered once more at Tipasa that one must keep intact in oneself a freshness, a cool wellspring of joy, love the day that escapes injustice, and return to combat having won that light.”

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