🧵 Thursday Thread: We Can Do Hard Things
Election panic, hurricane tragedy, war in the Middle East, the list goes on ... and so do we. But how? Let's raise our voices in a chorus of gratitude + action! Add your actions and resources here.
Hi, friends,
I’ve been so grateful this week to write in the dark with all of you. Thank you so much for your extraordinary letters in response to yesterday’s Instructions for Saying Goodbye (if you haven’t joined our Letter Reimagined Intensive, you can hop in now; it’s not too late—at WITD you’re never too late and you’re always enough, a topic Billie and I unpack in a new voice memo heading your way on Monday—watch for it!).
I am also grateful for the extraordinary Brevity essay that inspired this week’s letter-writing exercise, and also to Kelly McMasters for her thoughtful reflection on writing her own obituary each year (to which I provided the gift link in yesterday’s post). Kelly’s essay helped inform my thinking on yesterday’s 10-step exercise and its various options.
Writers, your inventiveness and range of interpretations are already, just one day in, taking my breath away. Your letters are making me laugh, cry, think, and feel. Some are giving me full-body shivers, all up and down my arms and legs—that happened more than once yesterday, as I stood at my kitchen counter reading on my laptop. I had to stop and let the sensation pass! Many of your letters are prompting me to think differently about things I thought I already knew, in subtle but real ways.
And all of your letters are doing what the best writing always does: making me feel something that lasts, and changes me somehow, even if subtly. Your letters are giving me hope.
Speaking of hope, I am thinking today of my Jewish friends who are now celebrating the holy festival day of Rosh Hashana and the start of a new year. I, too, have always experienced this time of autumn as a fresh start filled with reflection and hope for the year ahead.
But hope can feel hard to come by these days in a world plagued with problems that feel, more often than not, too heartbreaking to bear and too big to solve.
How do we press on meaningfully under the weight of the world’s brutality and grief?
I don’t have answers. But I do know that, as Glennon Doyle says, “we can do hard things,” and we get them done better together than alone. I also know that even when outcomes are beyond our individual control, it still helps to live with intentional gratitude and action.
I think this is connected to what mindfulness teacher Cory Muscura says about stillness and action:
Action without stillness is reactivity. Stillness without action is resignation. Action informed by stillness is purpose.
I guess for me, stillness allows for the gratitude, but gratitude alone is not enough, because to be purposeful, gratitude must be accompanied by some form of action. I realize this is not exactly what Moscura is saying, but it’s at least adjacent.
So I thought what we could do for today’s thread, as my “despair for the world grows in me” while my election anxiety spirals out of control, is to share with one another:
Something(s) we’re grateful for right now
Something(s) we’re actively doing right now toward positive change
I’ll go first.
Gratitude:
That’s easy.
and Z were in a major car crash on the I-94 interstate on Sunday—their Prius was totaled. But both of them are okay aside from an airbag abrasion on Billie’s arm. I have absolutely no words with which to express my profound, immeasurable gratitude. No words except thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.On top of the many, many other things I feel grateful for, including WITD and all of you, the fact that Billie and Z both walked away from that crash intact feels like a miracle.
Action:
My advanced fiction class at Moose Lake prison feels like action, it feels like it matters, it feels purposeful and life-affirming.
I’m also supporting the Harris-Walz campaign.
And I’m giving to this GoFundMe, organized by Total Flight Solutions, which “is operating helicopter evacuation and supply missions in Western NC in response to the devastating effects of Hurricane Helene. This effort is made possible by the pilots and staff who are volunteering their time and expertise. We are accepting donations to cover the cost of fuel and supplies. Any funds collected in excess of helicopter operational costs will be donated to recovery efforts in Western NC.”
This GoFundMe was recommended by my friend Mary Pembleton, who lives in Western North Carolina with her husband and children, and was directly affected by the devastation there. Mary is a beautiful, beautiful writer (you can read a few of her NYT essays here; she wrote this especially gorgeous and devastating one—gift link here—after exploring the topic in WITD). I’m so grateful Mary shared this fundraiser because I like to give directly too boots on the ground when possible, because it has the greatest impact.
So, please, share your gratitudes and actions below.
Please do include links to any organizations or fundraisers or community efforts or joy-filled endeavors or or or that you’re supporting or engaged in and that we might want to know about.
We’re stronger together.
Love,
Jeannine
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