To see a world in a grain of sand…And eternity in an hour.
Blake
Caress the details.
Nabokov
Organizing is hard, often frustrating work. It takes an enormous amount of energy to get people to fit their personal vision into a collective effort and even more to help them focus on what matters as opposed to what doesn’t. In doing this work you have to deal with every sort of personal quirk and idiosyncrasy found in a, hopefully, large group of people.
Of course, as an organizer you are also part of an broad effort to make life better for people. And if you are organizing in a democratic fashion, your goal is to empower people, to lift them and their ideals up, and give them a vision of a better world that they themselves have created. Doing that kind of work is inspiring.
But sometimes the disconnect between our grand visions and hopes and what we do every day makes organizing even more difficult. The sense of purpose and uplift we organizers find when we talk among ourselves about the world we hope to create is easy to lose when we go out into the field or try to build coalitions The gravitational forces we find there drag us down from our heights of inspiration. Falling from those heights is sometimes even worse than never attaining them in the first place.
How do we keep our energy and spirit up? How do we escape gravity?
Doing so requires us to embrace the everyday elements of our work. We have to find inspiration and pleasure in every little frustrating, impossible interaction we have with the people with whom we work, in every small triumph, in ever tiny bend in history for which we are responsible, in every great line we say or write, and in every joke we make. And in each interaction, we have to see the people with whom we work–whose uncertainty, obstreperousness and recalicitrance cause us stress–not as barriers to getting our work done but as the prime focus of our work.
We have to approach each of these moments as opportunities to reach out to people, to teach from them; to engage them, not just in our immediate effort but in a new relationship with political action itself.
And we have to be deeply committed to learning from the people we are trying to organize. We have to recognize that when they disagree with us it might be because they see problems and possibilities we can’t see. Or it might be because we are talking in the wrong kind of language or at the wrong level of specificity. Or it might be that we are the wrong kind of person to engage them. Or we might misunderstand their interests or situation or circumstances. Or we might be deeply wrong in all these ways.
To make each of those moments, effective, however, we’ve also got to reserve one small bit of our soul and keep in mind the connection between our immediate task and the large and beautiful vision that moves us. That bit of distance can help us develop patient and expansive souls, capable of truly listening and adapting and responding to people we are trying to organize. And it can enable us to find our power in those moments when we hug the souls of other people and, in doing so, enable them to transcend their fears and anxiety, to find and express a passion for political engagement and and in doing so to rise above themselves.
And there is one more thing: we have to keep laughing. We have to be intensely engaged in what we do and yet, at times, step back and see the absurdity of our immense focus on moving the path of history to the left one degree at a time.
Last night I felt that I was hugging the soul of a woman as we talked about some pretty obscure details of health care policy. As I explained, in response to question after question and in what seemed like excruciating detail, how health care legislation would meet her personal concerns, I finally saw her relax and unscrunch her face. I was exhausted by the effort of talking to her, while making mental notes about how to change the way I answered questions like hers so as to take better account of concerns like her own and also make myself more easily understood. As we came to some agreement about how she might be effective moving health care reform, I saw her stand up straighter. And then I made a joke about the difficulty of keeping track of all the changes in the legislation before Congress and her eyes, which had remained grey and downcast, lit up. She left not only committed to working on our campaign but feeling a little better about political engagement itself.
Beautiful speeches about our cause point to the heavenly objects we are trying to reach and give us a sense of direction. But, for me, the explosive force that enables us to escape gravity is generated in the details, and indeed by the difficulty and friction that make for small, day to day moments of triumph, triumphs of learning as well as triumphs of securing agreement–and in the laughter that comes from taking it seriously but not too seriously.