Be Like Water

With the inundation of media, much of it quite frightening and disheartening, it can be a challenge to want to soldier on, to keep fighting. There is a desire to simply give up, give in, like someone freezing in the cold, preferring to just give up where your brain convinces you that you are warm and then you simply go to sleep. The idea of continuing to suffer, to keep your heart open and compassionate, suffering the effects of empathy, it can feel impossible.

I am a visualizer, and I use metaphor like a drug to keep me going. So I want to give you a metaphor to give you reassurance, to help strengthen your resolve for the many battles we have to face. Bruce Lee famously spoke of being like water. “Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless like water if you put water in the cup it becomes the cup and water can flow or it can crash.” Water is constant and with constant commitment over millennia can change the landscape. 

But we don’t have millennia to be like a quiet water drop breaking through rock, slowly, relentlessly. So I am going to encourage you to be another form of water, a tsunami.

A tsunami mobilizes quickly, moves rapidly towards the shore, comes from a great distance and builds strength before it makes landfall. It can change the landscape in moments and once it makes landfall it just keeps coming. It flows over, under, around and through any obstacle, it can pull institutions from their foundations, and it is indiscriminate.  

Our resistance movement needs to be not a not ripples in a pond, not a tidal wave but a national tsunami. We have barely made landfall and we are coming to shake the GOP from their foundation, to change the landscape. But we must all work together and we must be as committed to the rebuild effort so we do not simply leave devastation in our wake. #resist #bethetsunami