A few years back, at an event in which Rebecca Solnit was talking with Joan Halifax Roshi, she said something I remember as “You know what you do. You don’t know what you do does.”
That apparently can be traced back to Foucault. I am not well-versed in Foucault, but I like the idea a lot. You should just do your work – the work that you think matters – and leave what it does to the future. You can’t control what it does.
I know, for example, that various things I learned from Aikido teachers along the way have stayed with me, and that I have been pleased – and sometimes surprised – when someone tells me that something I said on the mat or in a presentation stayed with them.
Likewise many things I’ve read have affected me, such as the ones I’m writing about here. And I’m always thrilled when I discover that something I’ve written had an effect on someone else.
You do what you think is important and sometimes someone else gets it and takes it somewhere else. That’s what life is about.
I just finished reading Solnit’s The Beginning Comes After the End, and was struck by this sentence:
You yourself are not a single garment of destiny, but a thread or a stitch in the tapestry.
She is talking about how interconnected we are, despite all the efforts to disconnect us. It’s also a warning to let go of the hero myth, to reject the idea that there is one hero coming to save us all, that one hero becomes the garment of destiny.
Heroes of that ilk are created after the fact, after everyone has done their part – sometimes very heroically, true, but never really alone. We tell stories about what happened and because we have read and heard so many hero myths in our time, we focus on one person and make them the symbol.
But there are many of us, all doing our part. And, because in my mind the idea of being one thread or stitch relates to the idea of knowing what we do, we do our part without knowing how it will all come out.
That means the challenge is to do what you think is important and to do it in community wherever you can.
It is probably still doing something in community if you by yourself refuse to go along with something you think is wrong and take a stand on that point. Thinking something is wrong, but going along with it to avoid rocking the boat, is not the way to build good community.
There is a balance – god, there’s always a balance – between going along with a group even though you prefer a different path and going along with a group when you think what the group is doing is wrong.
Sometimes you need to compromise and sometimes compromising is bad. It’s not always easy to tell which is the right choice, but we cannot build a future together unless we learn to work as a group and yet we cannot let a group go down the wrong path without resisting.
There are times – and now is one of those times – when we need people to stand up, oppose something harmful or wrong, take the lead when others are faltering. Some of them will heroes, especially in that moment.
But heroes are just threads and stitches in the tapestry, as are we all.