Hard jobs and great opportunities: 60 years later

On Oct. 19, 1960, 300 Atlanta college students and supporters, including Martin Luther King Jr., rose up against discrimination and participated in a Nonviolent Sit-in at Rich’s department store in Atlanta, Georgia. King was arrested and jailed, having been told he had violated a probation he did not know he had been placed on after receiving a ticket for the false charge of driving without a license in May.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. leaves court after getting a four-month sentence in Atlanta on Oct. 25, 1960, for taking part in a lunch counter sit-in at Rich's department store. Source: Associated Press

King had received the ticket as he and his wife were driving home a white friend with whom they’d recently had dinner, author Lillian E. Smith.

Just three days prior to the October protest, Smith gave a speech in Atlanta to the Regional Students Nonviolent Movement, titled “Are We Still Buying a New World with Old Confederate Bills?” I’m thinking of her speech today, as we swear in our next Catholic president, and our first Black woman Vice President. Later today, Vice President Harris will, in turn, swear in two Democratic Senators representing the state of Georgia.

In Smith’s speech, she spoke about the future, about these students’ courage in choosing the hard way, their vision for a new world free of segregation, and the temptation to make compromises, including the one being promoted to vote for Nixon, giving voice to the anti-Catholic fears being stoked by southern politicians.

Smith was well known for her work challenging the empty promises of the southern “Big Deal” politicians.

They have been trying to buy a new life for the people, a new world, with old Confederate bills. And they don’t seem to know why it can’t be done. They do not, even now, understand why the old Confederate bills they flash around are not real currency. They have not learned a bitter lesson I learned, when I was six years old.

Smith told students the story of how she and her brother once found an old trunk in the attic filled with Confederate bills, how they took it to the candy store, and learned it was worthless. The store manager encouraged them to go home and burn the worthless money. “Don’t keep it around,” he said. “It will mix you up; get you all mixed up about everything…It has no value because there’s nothing back of it.”

This is the lesson the politicians had not learned, and many still have not.

They are still trying to buy a future for our country, with currency that is worthless: with ideas that have no validity, opinions that are not based on facts, values that are not human and Earth-size.

As we move forward today, to build a future on values that are human and Earth-size, we must still today, just as Smith urged 60 years ago, not fall for the empty currency of false hopes and false fears that turn us away from today’s awesome opportunity, a currency that tempts us to “sell out big causes for little ones”:

What happens to our country depends on our skill in separating false fears from rational ones, false dangers from real ones confronting the whole world. What happens will depend on whether we choose to live in a past full of ghosts or in a future full of hard jobs and great opportunities.

I’m thinking about Smith’s speech today, and about King’s bravery. Just as King’s actions inspired John F. Kennedy’s “call that changed history”, the Black Lives Matter protests across the country, and the work of bold organizers in Georgia, have inspired us to once again take up a future full of hard jobs and great opportunities. I hope we will rise to the challenge, and turn away from the worthless currencies Smith called out 60 years ago. Today begins an awesome opportunity, if we will take it up.

The coupling of coincidence and choice

There is no calculus.

The things that make our lives are so tenuous, so unlikely, that we barely come into being, barely meet the people we’re meant to love, barely find our way in the woods, barely survive catastrophe every day…Trace it far enough and this very moment in your life becomes a rare species, the result of a strange evolution, a butterfly that should already be extinct and survives by the inexplicabilities we call coincidence. The word is often used to mean the accidental but literally means to fall together. The pattern of our lives come from those things that do not drift apart but move together for a little while, like dancers. They come together in these moments that are the coupling of unseen forces, a generative warmth, a secret romance between the unknowns that are also our parents. — Rebecca Solnit

When I started my marathon journey blog, I wrote early on about an observation by Eric Meyer, whose young daughter had passed away. He remarked that after such catastrophes sometimes couples split up, but there is no formula or calculus to know which couples will make it and which won’t. “It isn’t strength that keeps a couple together in the face of crisis. It’s having the luck to remain compatible under the most extreme pressures,” he said. “Like any complex interaction between two complex systems, the outcome is fundamentally unpredictable.” It has to do with the series of moments of coincidence that make up the couple’s history and experience.

Not all the accidents in our lives that provide the things that fall together to make us are secret romances and warmth. Some of the accidents are catastrophes, misfortunes, and several are moments of decision, a moment to change everything and end a marriage, quit one’s job, or move across country. Those moments of decision are patterns and have a regularity, but they are also the results of all the things that barely happened to put us there, at that moment of decision. As Meyer and Solnit note, even these dramatic accidents are not alone sufficient to move a life in one way or another. There is always agency, always a series of moments of decision that give movement to those inexplicable coincidences.

During the process of my separation and divorce a supportive friend once told me her marriage was in shambles and she had been thinking of leaving for a long time, but either she didn’t have the courage or hadn’t yet arrived at the moment of decision to leave. She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t arrived there yet, because she was truly miserable. But the inexplicabilities of her life’s coincidences had taken her to a place that was not her moment of decision. For couples who do split up, the series of accidents and whether and when they lead to a split or not are ultimately unpredictable; frequently friends remark with surprise because the couple in question was one they thought would always hold together.

There is often nothing grand or dramatic or even particularly clear about the arrival of that moment in a marriage; it most often doesn’t arrive with fanfare or drama. Sometimes it arrives because of the accidents of catastrophes and misfortunes and other dramatic moments, but whether or not such catastrophes lead to a moment of decision and what direction that decision takes are fundamentally unpredictable. Rather, they contribute to the coupling of unseen forces of things that did not drift apart, but moved together for a while until that moment of decision was taken up.

Like other incredible events, the exquisite candid and fashion photographs of Frank Horvat often came about because of a coupling of unseen forces, patterns of moments that suddenly coalesced and made manifest a particular moment in time. Horvat’s trick was to carry a camera at all times, so he could increase his chances of capturing such inexplicable coincidences. Building a writing practice or a new career or a new love are all a coupling of coincidence and choice, combined with a decision to carry that camera.

We Americans in particular have a love-hate relationship with the deus ex machina of the story. Like the ancient Greek critics, we prefer for events to unfold neatly based on the statistical evidence available and the finite list of players on the stage, but we also love the flair of the dramatic outlier, the hero of the story taking the momentus choice that pulls everything together because of his grand act of courage, pulling the baby from the burning building at the last moment. We love to point to the singular moment, the momentus decision. The combination of predictability and momentus choice lets us swing between predictability and heroism; I think we crave both the tragic and heroic story. Unfortunately, I think building a writing practice, career, or love is neither. Ultimately, building love or a writing practice or a new career are more like a series of inexplicabilities combined with a series of small moments of decision. That means heroic acts of determination increase the odds of success, and events provide the necessary but not sufficient coincidence, but the outcome is fundamentally out of our control. What remains for us is whether or not we carry the camera.

The next marathon

Marathons are like potato chips, someone said: you can't just do one. It's been true for me; since completing my first marathon last September my mind has been full of planning for my next, and my next after that. To that end, I've managed to successfully maintain a running base through the winter and am heading to Nashville this weekend for a half marathon, which is a stepping stone to my next full marathon (hopefully in June). But that's not the only marathon in my life.

The next big, scary marathon is building my writing practice. Writing is hard, exquisite, terrifying, thrilling for me. I love writing, it's an expansive space I can share and a straitjacket demanding precision and clarity. Most of all, it's a practice that requires building just as a marathon is building miles and having good runs and bad. So, just like I did when I began my marathon journey last year, I've decided to join a group to help develop that practice for myself, Jeff Goins' 500 Words 31 day practice challenge. This blog will be a place where I share my best ideas and writing, a chronicle of my next marathon and a challenge to myself to start where I am in my work and fall down and get up and work again. If you are working to build a practice as a writer, I invite you to check out Jeff's page and consider taking up the challenge yourself. If you do, let me know; I'd love to hear from you.

Change is slow

In marathon training, runners are told to add no more than 10% to their distance per week, a technique called progressive overload. More than that, and you risk injury.

It's easy to get impatient. The slow, incremental changes that come with both the habit of daily mileage and the gradual increase in miles can seem to take forever.

Change is slow. Focus on the step in front of you.

And you will learn about yourself. You will have slow change. You will help yourself and others through this change. You will find out what it’s really like when you put in the effort. You will find happiness in each step, in the learning you experience along the way.

Change is worth the effort, and the results aren’t what you fantasize about — they’re much better, if you pay attention.

http://zenhabits.net/slowchange/