Clarity for Teachers: Day 38
‘The world is full of drama. Don’t respond with anger, but with patience.’
There are twelve of us sitting around a table in an unfamiliar building. I’m in my mid-30s. My friend Chris has gathered us for a workshop, part of the later stages of his PhD research on the lives of people involved in social change. There’s a lot of talk about activism. At some point in the morning, I find myself bursting out, excitedly, ‘Is there anyone else here who doesn’t identify as an activist?’
I don’t expect I waited for an answer, rather I must have gone on to spill out the reasons for my discomfort with the label. The next thing I remember is during the break that followed: I’m sitting in a toilet cubicle, listening to a conversation about my outburst. One of the other participants, a film-maker, is expressing some exasperation. ‘I know, mate,’ Chris is saying. ‘He’s just like that, you know, he spends all day working with words.’
It’s usually humbling to hear how people talk about you when you’re not there. Nothing unkind was said, it was simply a reminder that you don’t always notice how you come across. Anyway, at that point in my life, I was due for a certain amount of humbling.
Something had happened, not long after I turned thirty. After years of being around people and projects that sought to bring new possibilities into the world — activists, artists, hackers, social entrepreneurs, start-ups, think tanks — I’d finally discovered my agency in all of this, an ability to talk projects into being and weave together the relationships that gave them a chance of taking root. One result was that, for the first time in my life, I found myself dealing with people I didn’t know who knew who I was. My work got written about, praised and critiqued, and whichever angle the article took, it usually felt like looking in a fairground mirror.
It was a messy time. For all the attention, I was still living from hand to mouth, and the excitement of discovering I could make things happen had bred an impatience. Working fast, you make mistakes — and when I read the criticism, there were usually parts of it that rang true. Worse, the fiercest critics tended to be the kind of people I was used to counting as friends, activists with a powerful sense of justice who reminded me of people I’d spent time around and looked up to.
So when I sat in that room and said I didn’t see myself as an activist, it had to do with not wanting to set myself up to those standards. Not wanting to claim the selflessness that I’d come to associate with that label, or the moral certainty. I was stumbling towards a way of talking about the work I do that leaves more room for how often I get things wrong, though it would be a while before I found the courage to say that plainly.
Today’s advice sends me back to all of this, because there’s a link between activism and anger, between acting and drama. And isn’t there plenty about the world that we ought to get angry about, if we’re paying attention? The counsel of patience can sound like a counsel of passivity.
There are too many people I admire who would call themselves activists for me to want to disparage the term. I’m in favour of acting, of trying to change things, of being guided by a sense of injustice. The hesitation comes, I suppose, when this is transmuted into a noun: when some of us are invested in the identity of being activists. As though we were not all called to act at times, and at times called to refrain from acting. Or is it that a word like activist is a way of naming those who answer the call?
I’m still ‘like that’, you know — I still spend all day working with words, and worrying at them, and I know that it can get exasperating.
Go back, then, to the fork in the road. The moment in my mid-twenties when I turned aside from a career in a BBC newsroom and set out looking for other ways of telling stories, other ways of using words, other ways of shaping a life. That spring, I had a series of encounters in the pages of books: whole chapters that could have been written to me, that read like letters from the older, wiser friend I badly needed. Only once, though, did I reach the end of the book and write straight back to its author.
That book was Soil and Soul: People Versus Corporate Power by the Scottish activist Alastair McIntosh. It revolved around two stories which Alastair had been at the heart of: the campaign that led to the community buy-out of the Isle of Eigg and the passing of land reform legislation giving rights to communities across the Highlands and Islands; and the campaign to stop the superquarry on the Isle of Harris.
Most of the activists I’d known up to that point were not much older than me, many of them seemed to be fuelled by anger, and only rarely did the action they were part of show signs of changing anything. Reading Alastair’s book, I realised that I was meeting someone already in the middle years of life, who had neither burned out nor sold out, and who had been part of campaigns which won against the odds.
At the age I was then, it’s hard to overstate the importance of finding people a generation ahead of you who show you that another life is possible. Alastair and I began a correspondence that would slowly grow into a friendship. Among the lessons I took from his writing and his example was that anger isn’t enough: you meet people who are on fire with life and fuelled by anger in their mid-twenties, but you don’t meet many angry forty-year-olds who still seem full of life. You have to find another kind of fuel.
And then, there’s a passage in Soil and Soul where Alastair is describing the early years of the Isle of Eigg campaign. He’s fretting that things aren’t moving fast enough, when his older, wiser friend and co-conspirator Tom Forsyth slows him down. ‘Don’t force it,’ he says, and he talks about the Daoist understanding of wu wei, ‘action through no action’:
‘We’ve got no conventional resources,’ Tom would continue. ‘We’d wear ourselves out in no time if we beat our wings against the granite block of landlordism. So just flow around it for now, like a river. The times are getting right; opportunities will arise. Act effortlessly. Do only what feels good and gives you energy. And don’t flinch from rising to the occasion, incisively, energetically, when the sand moves and the block starts to shift. That’s the way of Wu Wei.’
There it is, then: the place where patience comes in, where all that it’s right to be angry about in the world calls on us to move beyond anger, to be willing to wait for the moment to act, and to act with clarity.
Västerås, 26 April, 2020
This is the thirty-eighth in a series of commentaries on ‘A teacher’s advice on how to be clear’, Charlie Davies’s reworking of the 1000-year-old Buddhist text, ‘Advice from Atisha’s Heart’. I’m writing these as I take part in Clarity for Teachers, a course that Charlie is leading. You can find out more on the How To Be Clear website.
