I had an elaborate itinerary for Election Day that I took to calling the Panic Abatement Plan. I’d walk in the woods early because temperatures are still breaking records down here. I’d stop by Parnassus Books, which would be full of kindred souls, and pick up my special order, Rachel Carson’s “The Sense of Wonder.” I’d visit the puppy room at the Nashville Humane Association. I’d have lunch with one friend, and I’d talk on the porch with another. I’d take my new book out to the yard and read while sugar maple leaves fell in golden drifts around me in the last light of day.
There were other items in the Panic Abatement Plan that looked more like a traditional to-do list for a day away from work — writing thank-you notes, cleaning bird feeders, deadheading zinnias so they’ll make new blooms to feed the bees in this summer that will not end. Maybe I’d get to that part of the list, or maybe I wouldn’t. It didn’t matter either way.
I voted early, so the Panic Abatement Plan was really just a daylong distraction project to keep me calm while my fellow Americans decided what sort of country we will all be living in. The whole point was to spend the day in the company of beauty and friendship and something that, if you stood way back and squinted, might look a little bit like peace.
I’m so glad I gave myself that day of sweetness. By the next morning, my eyes were sandpaper and a rock was lodged in my throat. Sweetness seemed lost from the world forever.
I am 63 years old, a liberal child of the Jim Crow South. For my whole adult life, I have been fighting for a world where a man like Donald Trump would never be elected — not once, much less twice — and I am tired of fighting. A lot of us are tired of fighting. A different result last week would have been, at best, a temporary reprieve, and I knew that. I wanted the reprieve anyway. I wanted to wake up on Nov. 6 and breathe a sigh of relief.
But Donald Trump is not a blip or an aberration. That should have been clear long since. From the moment the carnival barker in chief came down a golden escalator, through his first outrageous campaign of lies, through the nightmare of his first snake-oil presidency, through his murderous silence during the assault on the Capitol, through the hearings and the trials that only shored up the support of his base, the MAGA fever dream was never even close to breaking.
The people in communities most imperiled by that fever have known this truth from the beginning. I’m embarrassed that it took me so long to give up my own naïve hope for a return to “normal.” What this election has made absolutely, indisputably clear should have been clear to me all along: I will be fighting for the rest of my life to preserve the promise this country still holds for pluralism, for fairness, for decency, for true freedom. I am never going to breathe a sigh of relief. What choice is there but to fight?
To give everything we have to the cause of keeping American democracy alive, if only long enough for another generation to have the chance to fight for it, is nothing less than a moral obligation. As Adrienne Johnson Martin, editorial director of the nonprofit news site MLK50, wrote last week in a newsletter to subscribers, “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t wrong: The long arc of the moral universe still bends toward justice. The weight of the work helps it bend.”
During the last six days, plenty of writers have been analyzing the data, coming up with theories for why the guy I passed leaving the restaurant on Election Day was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words, “I’m with the felon.” I have my theories, too, but I don’t want to write about them. They aren’t needed now.
I want to write instead about grief. I want to find words for how the only thing that ever comes close to touching the solitude of grief is tenderness. There is no cure for profound grief, but beauty and love and tenderness can walk alongside it and ease the solitude at least.
For me, beauty looks like walking in the rainy woods. Love looks like the company of good friends. Tenderness looks like a novel that captures the full, complex range of human experience. (My new favorite is “Time of the Child” by the Irish novelist Niall Williams, which will be published in this country next week. It is a study in human community that made me laugh out loud and remember how to love even the people who cause others so much suffering, and especially those who come together to ease it.)
To fight the calamities that are coming, we will need to find what gives us joy even amid the fight, and we will need to find a way to rest when the fight is too much to bear. To allow the braying winners to turn us into desolate, impotent shadows with stones forever lodged in our throats would be to let them win even more surely than they won at the ballot box last week.
So for me there will be more watchful stillness. More walks in the woods to watch the still heron standing one-legged in the shallows; to watch the still deer, waiting to see if I mean them harm; to watch the stillness of the red-eared sliders, resting on the sunny log, and the stillness of the wood duck, whose stillness is on the surface only; to linger in the stillness of the lake itself, a perfect mirror giving back the sky.
There will be more books and more poetry and more time with friends and more afternoons sitting on a bench and watching the leaves fall. I will be fighting with all that I am, but I will also be reminding myself again and again not to wait for the world to give me a reason to sigh with relief. I will give myself respite. I will remember not to keep waiting for sweetness and rest to arrive on their own.
“If it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all,” Shakespeare wrote in “Hamlet.” I’ll remember that, too.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
