Showing Up is Half the Battle

Forrest and I were looking around at our garden last night and talking about how if you’d told us five years ago that we would have an urban garden complete with 15 raised beds, we would have told you that you were crazy. In the same way, if you had told me that within nine months, I would have written over 150 blog posts and 35,000 words on a second book, I would have told you that you were crazy. Heck, if you had come to me ten years ago and had said, at some point, you will own two dogs, a cat, and have three kids and will think it’s no big deal when those kids ask you for a kitten, I would have told you that you were crazy.

As I get older, I realize how many of these seemingly gargantuan life tasks, like writing thousands of words, don’t just happen. Instead, they are the slow accumulation of small choices. If you’ve been following the blog for any length of time, you’ve realized that’s pretty much my schtick. But when it comes to advocacy, I think it’s so, so important to remember that. The big social movements we see are the culmination of thousands of small choices. The smaller changes we see at a local level are also the culmination of thousands of small choices.

In some ways, this feels daunting. If I want to advocate for low-income housing in my community, I have to accept that it will take thousands of small choices. Anyone who has worked in any organization for any amount of time knows how hard it is to change the direction of any group of people. But in other ways, I find it reassuring. These huge, seemingly impossible tasks were made up of many very possible steps. Our job is to figure our what those steps are and then, to do them.

So much of it is unglamorous. So much of advocacy is hard, painstaking work that comes to nothing. Often that work is on ourselves. Reading, learning, asking questions so that we might learn to understand lives that are different from our own. Showing up to every meeting, showing up to volunteer every time. Showing up to hard conversations and showing compassion to others even when we don’t want to.

That low-level work is so underrated. The people who do it are often overlooked and when we engage in it, we’ll often feel unappreciated. But showing up for our community is the most important part of advocacy. Because we can have all the right opinions, all the right words, and all the right plans for change but if we do not show up in the small things, nothing will ever happen.

How can you show up for your community today?