On taking your rest and finding joy

I am awake; the sun is making its daily walk above the horizon into the clouds in the east as the streetlights meander to bed one by one along the avenue. Grey day, here. As I sit on the curb smoking a cigarette, a mother pushes her baby in a stroller and leads two little, dumpy dogs down the sidewalk toward the boulevard. A police helicopter shatters the stillness of this sleepy neighborhood as it buzzes past in the gloomy sky above.

A line of young men in paint-covered jeans and hoodies laugh and share coffee with one another as they wait patiently outside the job center down the block; they stand in communion together before the locked door, sharing news and stories as they wait for a day's wage in the early morning light. A dog barks in the distance and an unhoused neighbor trundles past the front stoop of my apartment, pushing a stolen Target shopping cart full to bursting with the morning's take from the neighborhood dumpsters.

It is Tuesday, February 10, and the dusty world comes alive in my little corner of Los Angeles.

I walk back up to my shoebox apartment and settle into my reading chair; the cool morning air breezes through the open windows, lifting the gauzy curtains and sending steam from my second cup of coffee over the pile of books teetering precariously on the chairside table. The radio is on, tuned to Classical California. Peach sits comfortably on the newly made bed, listening to an orchestra playing a particularly intense movie score. The notes mingle with the sounds of the twittering birds outside, and she closes her eyes in apparent meditation before settling in for a morning snooze.

It is a quiet morning; a slow morning, where the world seems to struggle to rise from the warmth of its bed and into the bustling streets of this dirty megalopolis. We all seem to collectively groan under the weight of this often intolerable existence.

The world does feel monstrously heavy these days. Each one of us walks with shoulders hunched and head bowed, arms straining mightily; each of us Atlas struggling under the weight of the heavens. The neverending ping of news notifications (has ICE killed another neighbor today?), has become so incessant and persistent that we have begun to hear them in our dreams.

Waves and waves of collective trauma and grief, moral injury and outrage, crash into us without ceasing. We feel each reverberation of pain and privation like a spider in its web—the threads of our lives jump and rattle with each new humiliation, each new tragedy.

Moments of joy (and there are many of them) often feel almost hollow against the onslaught of agony and oppression that needles its way under the skin. How can we seek out joy when our neighbors are disappearing into the gaping maw of the mass deportation machine? How do we cling to happiness when another father, mother, child, sibling is losing their liberty or their life at the hands of this police state? We battle against an enduring guilt of not doing enough as we take our rest, commune with loved ones, and share in the simple pleasure of a night out, a meal together, a vacation.

What right do we have, we say to ourselves. It feels selfish, maybe even like we are sticking our heads in the sand, trying to escape the suffering, the death. Perhaps some of us are doing this—clinging to a sort of apoliticism that we feel may protect us from the worst of these conditions. It isn't happening to me, so I refuse to engage, some of us may say. These words are not for those who refuse to see what is happening right under their noses, but instead those who feel undeserving of a moment of calm, or peace, or joy because of the current state of the world.

Revolution, progress, reform—this writhing mess of persons and ideas and the struggle for a world that is better than this cannot exist without making space for joy, for humor, for dance.

Life, as we all know, is not a binary. The revolution we are building is not 'all or nothing' in the daily rumblings of our lives. What I mean is we are messy, full of contradictions and complicated feelings. We cannot be on all the time. We are not built to withstand the onslaught of tragedy without building some sort of release valve for the trauma we are enduring. We are not infallible, and the fallout from unregulated burnout can and will reduce us to angry shells of our former selves, incapable of meeting a future moment where our success depends on our ability to stay calm, to organize efficiently, to work with empathy. Taking moments for rest, for relaxation and decompression, for joy does not mean that we do not care about the horrors going on around us, but it does give us the space to decompress and strengthen our resolve.

Revolution, progress, reform—this writhing mess of persons and ideas and the struggle for a world that is better than this cannot exist without making space for joy, for humor, for dance. Millions of people sat down in their homes, in bars, gathered around cell phones and TVs, to watch Bad Bunny's Superbowl Halftime Show. They danced, they felt joy, they shared in collective celebration.

As Dan Savage wrote in his reflections on the AIDs crisis, "we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night, and it was the dance that kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for." In that spirit, as I sit here in the soupy morning of a grey California day, I will savor my warm cup of coffee and share jokes with the workers across the street. I'll pack up my things and head to a friend's later to set up my little art studio in his garage, stopping off at the local picket line to lend my support on the way. I'll plan my next non-work trip without guilt, knowing that the time spent in rest and amongst family will give me the energy to continue organizing upon my return. And I'll dance with my friends whenever the mood strikes, because as Emma Goldman once wrote,

I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy...If it meant that, I did not want it.

I sincerely hope you find those moments of rest, of joy, of revolutionary optimism, too.