Where to Find Power When It Feels Like You Don’t Have Any

A business mentor of mine always advised to go where there isn’t much traffic.

If everyone’s online, be in person. If everyone’s doing hot takes, wait a beat or six to discern where you stand. If everyone’s at 101 degrees, be the shade that helps brings the temperature down.

We have a surplus of understandable fear these days. If it were sold at the grocery store, fear would be deeply discounted. Or as Hafez wrote, "Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions."

Fear stifles action, and its cousin cynicism tells us our actions wouldn’t matter anyway. Which is exactly what the powerful want: people to believe we don’t have power. Because if we don’t think we can do anything, we’re likely not to do anything. And then, easily, the powerful snatch up more power.

So as Martin Luther King, Jr. suggests, you can be a thermometer that reflects the temperature, or you can be a thermostat that sets it.

The question I’ve been asking myself - when I remember, at least - is what can I bring to a conversation, text chain, Zoom call, meeting, that could take it to a more helpful and less well-trodden place ("it was grassy and wanted wear,” Robert Frost wrote in “The Road Not Taken”).

None of this is to negate people’s feelings. Fear is a normal response to the times we find ourselves in. But fear, as has been said, will not make us safer.

So a framing I like is, “I hear what you’re saying. This is a ruthless, relentless season we’re in. And at the same time, I’m wondering if there are some opportunities here...”

It’s an invitation to another path through this moment. A path that requires our hearts to do that most profound of things: hold fear and despair alongside curiosity and possibility.

Democracy is not a spectator sport. It’s an all-hands-on-deck project, and that project is a bit understaffed right now. There’s a role for each of us. Fear blinds us to that, but thermostats can awaken us to it. The future isn’t written yet; we can have a say in these next pages of history.

A story I love (please forgive the encore if you’ve heard it here before) comes from Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. He wrote about refugees after the war fleeing Vietnam on crowded rafts through the wickedly dangerous Gulf of Thailand.

If everyone on the raft descended into fear - and who could blame them? - they were likely to sink. But if just one person could maintain a sense of calm, of hope, that was enough. Their belief spread, and the refugees would make it through.

Any one of us could be that person on the raft.