The Wisdom of Pulling Back from the News

Finding light in the fragments

Living our Grounding Virtues.

Dear Friends,

I can’t count the number of people I’ve encountered across the last weeks who have reported that they are deleting apps, limiting their consumption of news, boycotting or disrupting the barrage of information overwhelm. I’m beginning to see this as a spiritual discipline for being alive in this time. It is not to be confused with disengagement or passivity. It may be an essential tool for sanity, and a key to discerning and sustaining a sense of agency for the time ahead.

I find myself pondering my long-ago conversation with Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, which remains one of my most treasured. She told me the ancient story, as her Hasidic grandfather had told it to her, behind the Jewish ethical imperative to “repair the world.” In the beginning of creation, the light of the universe was shattered into a million million pieces, which lodged as shards inside everything and everyone. Our calling, as human beings, is to look for the light from where we stand, to call it out, to gather it up — and in so doing, to help repair the world.

I said to her then, and am keenly aware as I write now, that a story like this could sound like a mild and sweet — far too mild and sweet — offering into the gravity of this world. She countered that stories, whether we acknowledge this truth as serious or not, are the flesh on the bones of the facts of our lives — and, I would add, of our life together. We’re muting our news feeds because the stories they tell are not just informing us but shaping us, taking hold of our minds and hearts and nervous systems and limiting or galvanizing forces of hope and despair, groundedness and action.

The pragmatism and wisdom of her grandfather’s sacred story, Rachel told me, is in how it calls each of us to help repair the part of the world that we can see and touch.

There, the very quality of our presence to others, moment to moment, is powerful — an ordinary power we scarcely appreciate to “make someone’s day” with patience, kindness, generosity, gentle words. There too, in the places we can see and touch, we can cultivate the “proximity” Bryan Stevenson counsels as key to meaningfully attend to the hardest chasms and wounds in our world. In proximity we can tangibly approach understanding and intelligence and impact that most of us cannot begin to exercise over most of this hour’s unfurling news.

It feels important for me to say that when I speak of the general tumult and distress of being alive now, I know we are feeling this on every side of our life together, every side (and of course there are far more than two sides) of every issue. A burning reason in my mind that we must stop fixating on distant levels of power — as that barrage would have us do — is that our country needs healing. That healing is not merely political. The American (and global) political drama is a symptom of pain and fear, of uprooting magnitudes of change, of dreams and hopes shattered and betrayed, and alienation from each other and ourselves.

"Civility" is a word I’ve used sparingly in these years — as also perhaps too sweet, too mild. But I’m circling back to my own call to what we name “Adventurous Civility” in the Grounding Virtues of the On Being Civil Conversations Project: the creation of spaces and relationships where we hold and honor the meaningful and important differences between us — yet insist that what divides us now does not have to define what might be possible between us. I invite you to explore these Civil Conversations materials, and the Grounding Virtues, which many groups have used across time to have new conversations: hard conversations that give life.

With love, as always,

Krista