Like a lot of people, I was surprised by the presidential election results last November. How the heck did that happen? But while fearing the worst, I am hoping for the best. Yes, it will be a bumpy ride, but we’ve been down this road before. And I am convinced good people will step up when needed.
Why am I so chillaxed? Maybe it’s my semi-regular meditation practice. Or the fact I’m now retired and find myself worrying less about, well, everything. Or perhaps all that reading I did on stoicism a few years ago has started to sink in. (The Stoics believed our reactions to events are more important than the events themselves.)
Fortunately, three wise women are showing us a potential way forward post-inauguration. All share a common theme in their writings: hate and anger don’t win the day. Love wins. And I don’t mean romantic love, but the fierce Valerie Kaur kind of love where we:
Love ourselves, love others, and even love our opponents.
Below are the musings of the female elders Anne Lamott, Marianne Williamson and Natalie Sudman, with some light editing on my part.
“Today, we take care of ourselves”
A few days after the election, the beloved author and social activist Anne Lamott found herself in the same place I am: taking it in stride. She wrote:
Why aren’t I freaking out more? I don’t know. I just believe in goodness, radical self-care, and that grace bats last. So, sue me. How do we keep the faith in goodness? I don’t know. We just do. What happened had been in the works for years, but we weren’t paying attention or couldn’t quite believe it. Jung said, “What we don’t bring to consciousness, comes to us as fate.” And we need—eventually—to take a look at that.
What Lamott did next was to talk about what she did immediately after the election. And her words from two months ago, still seem like solid advice today and the days that follow.
Today? We take care of ourselves and those we love. We always, always take care of the poor, with donations, or bags of groceries to local food pantries. We get outside: The day after the election, my husband suggested we take a walk. After ten minutes or so, I said grimly, “This was not a good idea.” Everything was too intense and real. I felt like a burn victim. Then ten minutes later, I began to see beauty all around me, in nature and neighbors, and our good dog. When I noticed how droplets sparkled amid grass stems, it helped me begin to breathe again. Left foot, right foot, left foot, breeeeeathe: this, and kindness, are all we need to know right now.
“Change has to start with us.”
Marianne Williamson ran for president in 2024 and while her latest book The Mystic Jesus was released before the election, it captured the zeitgeist of our times. Williamson writes:
The world we’re living in today is saturated by a mental poison. It is more than toxic; it’s hateful. We all must do our part to deescalate the madness …. we’re either adding to the solution or adding to the problem.
So how do we add to “the solution” in such a volatile political environment? Williamson advises us to lead with love, just like Jesus did:
Send love to your friends, to your family, to your customers or clients, to your boss, to your colleagues, to your employees, to the people you know, to the people you don’t know—and yes, to the president elect, too. Either our heart is opened, or our heart is closed. There is a way to disagree, to set boundaries, even to oppose behavior that is intolerable, without withholding love. That is the message of Jesus. It is as radical today as it was two thousand years ago.
“Hate doesn’t heal hate. Only love does.”
I recently wrote about Natalie Sudman and her slim but powerful book Application of Impossible Things. There she tells the story of her near-death experience (NDE) during the Iraq War, when the Land Cruiser she was riding in was blown up by a roadside bomb. Sudman also writes the occasional blog post and a day or two after the election she captured the way a lot of people felt.
Many times today I hated the people who think Trump is okay – hated them as sick and violent. I held my stone, feeding the hate, feeding the fear. That is not peace. That is not effective response—effective response can only come from a base of love. Anything less is fueling the divisive aggression, hate, anger, and irrationality – all forms of fear. Fear can only create more fear. Hate can only create hate. Hate doesn’t heal hate: only love does that.
According to Sudman, there’s a positive side to the election results. A chance for a fresh start, which she compares it to a closet that needs to be cleaned out:
Everything we’re encountering has been here with us all along — all the hate, insecurity, meanness, danger, aggression, fear — none of it is new. It’s just wholly visible now. It has been brought into view. Good: what is hidden can’t be cleaned up. If a mess is going to be cleaned up, it has to be seen. Now we can see it clearly for what it is.
The first thing that happens when cleaning out a closet is that you make a huge f’ing mess by pulling everything out of that closet. That’s the only way you’re going to be able to sort through it all—make it visible. In order to get rid of what is rotten or broken or useless, you have to get it out of the closet. Then you can get rid of the rotten and clean up what is useful and good, clean out the closet itself. Now you have things you can use in a closet that is clean.
So how can we best handle the situation? Sudman asks, “How do I embody love, even here and now? How do I find compassion for those who know not what they do?” Her response:
Be kind. Be peaceful. Be the presence of love, even now, even as you stand strongly for justice, truth, inclusion, and tolerance in whatever way and place you’re given. If you don’t know what that looks like, ask the soul – ask All That Is, God, Goddess, the One, Wakan Tanka, Allah, YWH, the Force, your own essence – ask and then be willing to wait for an answer.
“I wonder what will happen,” is a useful phrase that can help put some space between expectations and reality. Ask for what you want, set goals, acknowledge expectations, then say, “I wonder what will happen?” Allow this opening for something even better than you have imagined.
“Better than imagined?” I’ve been around long enough to know that sometimes things do turn out better than we could have envisioned. So, let’s keep an eye on not just what’s harmful and wrong, but what’s good and right, from those in office, and those outside of the political arena. Let’s give it a few weeks and maybe, just maybe, we will be surprised.
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