How We Protest through Our Purpose

Let's Light it Up

Purpose: the reason for which something is done or created, or for which something exists.

I don’t wade into politics or current events much with this newsletter, not out of apathy or agnosticism, but because I feel most aligned when connecting with folks on neutral territory. (Also, if you’re reading this, you’re probably not looking at that kind of gab from me.)

I come at my work, with my coaching & mentoring clients, in my community, with family and friends, from a starting point of commonality—as members of the same global tribe.

This is an undeniably rage-worthy time, however, and in my own ongoing attempts to align as closely to my values as possible, I’m finding it necessary to veer outside the nonpartisan for a sec.

We’re seeing and feeling more anger, desperation, disbelief, fear and panic, seemingly building by the day and sometimes by the hour, and often depending on where we’re focusing our attention (more on that later). These feelings are all entirely justifiable, and, they can also deeply inhibiting.

While many of the threats are very, very, real, there’s never been a more appropriate time to reconnect with our greatest individual resource, one of the few things that can’t be either ascribed to us or removed against our will.

Our purpose.

Our greatest form of protest—particularly in response to the tyrannical forces of greed, oppression, willful ignorance and egomania—is to double down on our individual purpose.

When we connect with our purpose, when we live it and operate from its instruction manual, the effect accumulates. Our purpose becomes communal. Our purpose changes things.

“We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.” – Mother Teresa

Let’s go.

1. Pay attention, with intention.

True, what you pay attention to becomes your life. Also true, nothing changes by simply knowing it exists.

Please, for the love of anything and everything, first stop paying attention to what makes you feel bad. Direct your attention toward where you actually want to engage with your time and energy.

I don’t recall where I came across this last, who said it/wrote it, but the when is recent. And I love it: ‘If your eyes are on the ditch, you’re going in the ditch.’

If you’re trying to surmount a physical obstacle, ditch or otherwise, you’re not looking at the ditch, at the most terrifying part of the jump. You’re looking at the other side of the thing. You’re looking at where you want to be, not where you don’t.

Stop looking into the ditch.

‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.’ - Oscar Wilde

Be informed, but think of the input a little like the food we eat—crucial for survival, and also, too much can actually kill you. Junk food? That stuff designed in a lab for all the flavor and none of the nutrition? It’ll kill you a lot faster.

2. Spend time on purpose.

We often activate our thoughts first through our opinions. It follows naturally, as our opinions are based on our values—on what we prioritize, believe deeply in, our navigation points. Our values then inform our purpose—that common element to all we hold tightest, the north star that reconfirms our heading whenever referenced.

If you don’t know what your purpose is, find it.

If you don’t know how to live your purpose, learn it.

If you get held up, frustrated, stymied, redirected, recommit to it.

And by the way, purpose isn’t grandiose by default. Your purpose doesn’t have to be stopping climate change or curing cancer, but it can be. Your purpose can also be about living a certain way, with reliability, commitment, love or creativity.

“If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, go out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures. Sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed music. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

3. Purpose is the firewood, passion is the flame.

You can’t throw a rock these days without hitting another fricking meme on passion. It’s a popular topic, and a divisive one. We want it, want to live it, wish it was where it isn’t, and are constantly led astray in our attempted understanding of how it actually works.

Pro tip : passion serves your purpose, not the other way around.

You don’t start with passion (a feeling) and then act with purpose (a thing of intention). Your purpose, the soil from which the seeds of your life grow, is the substrate. Your passion is the nutrition that feeds those seeds… it’s sunlight, water, compost. They work together, these two. They inform each other, and yet one is very necessarily the birthplace of the other.

Firewood without fire is just wood. And fire, well… you know how well that works without the material to ignite it.

4. Don’t just talk. Also do.

We’re all talking a really big game. Constantly. And, as we’ve come to realize, what started as a few experiments in social connection has quickly become an entire landscape of social overwhelm. We’re talking to each other, incessantly, to people we know but mostly to people we don’t, and in ways we didn’t even several years ago. Opinions flow as freely as the words themselves, and the reaction to those opinions, agreement and disagreement both, is addictively validating.

We have a basic human need to be heard. It’s why we scream when we’re upset and yearn for another voice to soothe in response. Even though we often feel as if our online screams are muted once made, we feel relief in commonality, in hearing similar screams from other mouths and minds.

I’ll say it again, emotions paired with values create opinions. And though a crucial mode of communication, opinions alone don’t move the needle. Actions do.

‘How can you be known for what you value? By your actions.’ - Chani Nicholas

While engaging in any form of public protest is an essential act of social communion and communication, it’s performative (not always a bad thing, btw). It’s a physical manifestation of those opinions, and in a way that amplifies our singular voice with others who agree with us.

But don’t we know by now that we’re not alone? How much do we have to scroll? How many followers, how many updates and likes do we actually need to confirm our commonalities?

Yes, perform your opinion. Let us all know how you feel and what you think. Know also that signaling your thoughts and feelings doesn’t elicit change. Action does.

5. Get that action. Do things; be sane.

But wait. Isn’t writing, speaking, marching on your opinion an action? Absolutely. And, desperate times…

“Get action. Do things; be sane; don’t fritter away your time; create, act, take a place wherever you are and be somebody; get action.” - Theodore Roosevelt

Our energy is tanked when operating from a position of victimhood. As we move away from the lethargy of our hopelessness and into the activation of anger, even rage, we start to gain some freedom of movement. The key is to connect that anger with contributive action, to use the anger for creation alongside the destruction.

Dismantle. And also build.

If there’s one thing we learned in the four years of our current American president’s first go, it’s that our constant reacting was a form of validation, of complicity. Bullies, tyrants, despots, oligarchs, you name it, all thrive on attention, on hatred and adoration both.

A reaction is instinctive, primal, and a play for survival. A response is a thoughtful and intentional act, a slower and more deliberate play for solving a problem. We can react, and need to at some level, and/also, let’s respond with solutions above and beyond reacting with emotion.

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When we deny ourselves our greatest asset, our purpose, we deny the world around us the contributive effects of that purpose, and as materialized in the way only our individualism is capable.

Our purpose remains ours and ours alone, entirely immune to outside forces. It is our responsibility, and our greatest duty, to answer the world’s injustices with contributions borne of our values, of our humanity.

Make your fire, tend the flames, warm your people. Build in the glow of the light you’ve created.