We all need people to climb alongside us
The kids we're raising now will be tomorrow's activists. How can we show them how to fall and get back up? (Plus: An invite to our next gathering on 4/29!)
Save the Date: Our next In Tending online gathering is coming soon! We’ll circle up on Tuesday 4/29 at 8pm EST.
The topic of our discussion (and, we hope, many others to come) will be about claiming our agency in this historical moment, setting intentions for the spring season ahead, and supporting each other through both synchronous meet-ups and asynchronous tools, like the new Substack chat feature.
To get on the list for our next meetup, please fill out this form if you haven’t already. To join the In Tending community chat, click here. (You may be prompted to download the app if you haven’t already, but once that’s done it does make the reading, commenting and chatting aspects of your subscription experience much easier to access.)
“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
– Václav Havel
After the election, our family traveled, with some trepidation, to my home state of Utah. There, I had the privilege of staying in a hotel that doubled as a vast community space for the city’s hippie-punk counterculture. In this hotel, there is a cool coffee shop inside with a giant rainbow Pride flag hanging from the ceiling. There are flyers on the bulletin boards featuring information on finding Black birth workers and promoting queer-youth meetups on the local ski slopes. There’s a skate park on the ground floor offering affordable lessons for tiny kids to learn to kick-flip.
This may surprise some readers, but it doesn’t surprise me. This counterculture has long thrived right alongside Utah’s red-state, Mormon-Church majority. In November, Salt Lake County broke for Harris-Walz by ten points. Growing up in the heart of this kind of community led me to believe that even when you are surrounded by people who disagree with you, in a political context in which you seem outnumbered, incremental change is still possible.
Often, what makes sustained movements for change possible, even under difficult conditions, is a shared sense that there are plenty of other people who are willing to put in that effort right alongside you. It’s knowing you’re not alone.
My five-year-old son is growing up in much more liberal surrounds than I did, in coastal New England. But it is becoming clear that the fight ahead of him, and his generation, might transcend the turf wars over protecting this or that patch of wilderness, or the culture wars over this or that pop star, that characterized my red-state childhood. With this in mind, I began, on that trip to Utah, to give him some preliminary lessons in how to fall down and get back up again, and to gather strength from the effort of other people doing the same alongside him. Lessons I think that many of us still need.
This story is about that.
My son loves climbing any structure he can outside. So I was excited to learn that our hotel had a bouldering gym inside, open 24/7. He was excited too, the first time he saw the vast warehouse-like space, filled with colorful footholds in all colors of the rainbow. I rented him a pair of very tiny climbing shoes. And then I stepped back and waited, to see what he would do.
First, my son ran toward one of the inviting footholds immediately, and hauled himself to the top of a large orange semi-circle almost as wide as he was, sitting down with a big grin on his face like a frog on a lily pad.
Then, he fell off.
Fortunately, the floors of the bouldering gym were deep and soft, like gigantic mattresses. No harm done, save to his pride.
He tried to climb it again, and fell off again.
Then, he declared, I quit, I quit.
I had predicted this part.
We sat down together, to consider what to do next.
As my friend Jess Van Wyen and I discussed in this interview, I don’t think we are obligated to finish everything we start. Sometimes, the best thing we can do is to change course.
But we do have choices, beyond the binary of “grind” or “quit.” We can also take breaks. We can get help. We can let go of the last attempt and simply begin again.
As Roshi Joan Halifax would tell us, it’s best not to get too far ahead of ourselves, whether we’re learning to climb up vertical walls or break down oppressive systems. The Zen approach to activism she espouses is one in which you just do the next right thing. You grab the next available foothold, even if you’re not sure where it will lead. And you try to let go of the belief that you can map or control every step after that. Otherwise, you’ll get discouraged the first time you fall off the wall, as my son did.
As she says:
As Buddhists, we know that ordinary hope is based in desire, wanting an outcome that could well be different from what might actually happen. To make matters worse, not getting what we hoped for is often experienced as a misfortune. If we look deeply, we realize that anyone who is conventionally hopeful has an expectation that always hovers in the background, the shadow of fear that one’s wishes will not be fulfilled. Ordinary hope then is a form of suffering. This kind of hope is a nemesis and a partner with fear.
Hoping to make it all the way up the wall is fine, of course. But quitting when that doesn’t happen, or fearing the fall so much that we never attempt the climb, creates more suffering.
What is the alternative to “conventional hope”? Roshi Joan calls her Zen version of hope “wise hope.”
Wise hope is a hope unattached to outcome, unattached even to any particular ideology or language or established way of doing activism. It is a commitment to getting up and trying again, regardless of whether you ever make it to some imagined top, in any situation where trying makes more sense than quitting. Particularly those in which we see a way to reduce suffering—our own, or someone else’s.
Here are some examples Roshi Joan gives of things that make sense:
It makes sense to shelter the homeless, including those fleeing from war and climate devastation; it makes sense to support compassion and care in medicine in spite of the increasing presence of technology that stands between patients and clinicians. It makes sense to educate girls and vote for women. It makes sense to sit with dying people, take care of our elders, feed the hungry, love and educate our children.
In truth, we can’t know how things will turn out, but we can trust that there will be movement, there will be change. And something deep inside us affirms what is good and right to do.
Back at the wall, I wondered aloud to my son if there were other options besides walking away that felt good and right for him to do. With Roshi Joan’s framing in mind, I also gave him some examples.
“I wonder if there’s a feeling of being intimidated, or overwhelmed, in a space with so many things going on,” I said. “Could we stop climbing for a moment, and just observe? There are a lot of experienced climbers around us. By watching them closely, we could probably learn a lot.”
All around the gym, pierced and tattooed Utahns were hauling themselves up the walls, laughing and cheering each other on. I pointed out each time one fell down, then bounced back up. My son hadn’t noticed this before. He sat up a little straighter.
“I wonder, too, if you need me to put shoes on and climb next to you?” I asked. “Sometimes feeling like we’re all by ourselves is what makes it tricky to try again.”
He nodded. I went to get some shoes. I chose an easy ascent in the center of the gym, noting that the ones for beginners were marked with yellow footholds.
“I want to warm up and build my confidence,” I said, thinking out loud for his benefit, the way I’ve often done for my older students, when teaching them writing or math— processes that also include a lot of false starts and frustration. “So I’m going to start with something I know I can do.”
My son looked around the gym, taking note of all the other yellow footholds in the room. He watched me scramble up the wall about halfway, then drop down, huffing and puffing. Whew, that easy one felt hard. I must be a little out of shape. I noted that thought and let it go.
“Wow, okay. So I just fell down. But that’s okay. Maybe what we can both do is practice falling off the wall and landing, and falling off the wall and landing, and falling off the wall and landing, so that like those other experienced climbers, we just get used to it and it’s not such a big deal,” I suggested. “What do you think?”
My son didn’t answer me at first.
“I guess you could also sit here on the ground, feeling helpless, or like you have to leave,” I said. “But I just want you to know, you belong here as much as anyone else.”
More sullen silence. Sometimes these little encouraging speeches are as much for me as they are for my son. Sometimes I just have to trust that these mostly one-sided parental pep talk moments are sinking in, even with zero evidence. That is my wall to climb.
Eventually, we discerned that my son’s sullenness was due in part to the fact that he needed a snack. (Relatable!) So we sat down with some power bars, and then we made a new plan. My son would pick two more places to try to ascend before we left the gym. We talked about which ones, analyzing the first footholds and the ones above it, to assess whether the ascents were right for his body. When he got started, I cheered him on. Then, I hauled my own body up the knobbly neon-colored footholds a few times next to him, as did his dad.
He never did get very far, at least by an experienced climbers’ standards. But he climbed more than twice, because by then, he was having fun, and we were doing it all together. And perhaps more importantly, he learned how to begin again, the next time he chose to try.
Right now, I have a kid. Right now, he’s learning to fall down and get back up. Right now, I’m the best person to climb alongside him. Right now, that’s my right thing to do. That is what makes sense to me.
I have this instinct that all across the country, caregivers are offering the same kinds of lessons to the future activists growing up around them.
We are teaching our kids that they belong in any space where big things are happening, even if they have to start small.
We are teaching our kids that sometimes, the first step, when you’re feeling discouraged or intimidated, is learning from people who are one step ahead of you—heroes and heroines from history, spiritual warriors and clever queens from myth and legend, people who are leading movements of resistance right now.
We are teaching our kids that it’s normal to experience ups and downs, that change is the only constant, and that there’s no shame in falling off the wall sometimes. The alternative is never to attempt the climb.
We are teaching our kids that even though a vast number of people in this past election said, “Screw this, I’m gonna get mine, no matter what that means for anyone else,” there are countless others willing to climb alongside us, even if that means they have to slow down so we can keep up.
Right now, many of us may feel like we are facing a vertical wall, one that’s daunting and difficult to scale. But I think there is wise hope in remembering that there are kids all around us who have never climbed at all, who are watching us to see what we do. For those of us who are in a position to raise them or teach them, it may help to remember that showing a kid how to get back up after a fall is just as important, if not more so, than teaching them how to be on top.
Where I’m finding wise hope these days:
When I’m feeling low and need inspiration, I visit
’s work for a spiritual perspective that is different from but complementary to my own (“Give me the strength to do the next right thing”). I look to and her Engaged Dharma Book Club for great reads on nonviolent activism. I read ’s essays on taking a wider perspective. And I revisit, again and again, the wisdom in this talk between Lama Rod Owens, Prentis Hemphill and the great Angela Davis, which invites us all to “go to the frontlines of our work.”When I need to pause and look around, to learn from others who have been in this work a long while, I tune into the wise leadership of
(“Dear White Women: This is Where the Work Begins”) and the bracing pep talks of (“I feel overwhelmed by the brokenness of the world”), (“Hope is a woman who lost her fear”) and Mariame Kaba (“Letter to a Young Organizer”).When I’m not sure which foothold to grab next, I also consult wise writing partners like
, whose work on building community beyond the nuclear family is always deeply nourishing and generous. I also often read Chop Wood, Carry Water, New Means, , and the work of to remind myself of how many good people are already climbing alongside me, and pointing the way ahead.
Your turn: What wall are you climbing right now? And what keeps you going?
My heart and soul really felt this. Thank you for writing and sharing.
"Sometimes I just have to trust that these mostly one-sided parental pep talk moments are sinking in, even with zero evidence." and THAT I think about so often. It felt so reassuring to hear it reflected back.
Also, having a snack is always a great idea to recenter and refuel to begin again!
Thank you, as always, for your writing! I am doing a lot of yard work this spring, tending to a wild space that grew even wilder over the past 4 years of pregnancy and baby caretaking. Now that my boys are 2 & 4 they can be out there with me, the older one digging and carrying things, the younger one playing in the dirt. It feels small but also big, to cultivate this time for them to connect with the earth, to nurture their relationship with the land and the wildness in their own hearts. And we live on a hill so yes lots of falls and getting back up :-) I won't be able to make the gathering this time but I'll be on the lookout for the next one!