Made It

At Friends Camp, every session ends with a bonfire around which all the staff and campers gather to share reflections on their time at camp. At the end of the session for the oldest campers, my friend Will got up to recount a story from when he was at a camp as a high schooler. He said that when a whole group of students that were part of a leadership camp asked what their fears were, everyone except a single person said "failure". Well, come summer of 2006, Will said he didn't have that fear anymore, because he knew that having given himself a loving and supportive network of friends and family, he had already succeeded. By defining success in terms of what is really important to having a happy human life, he had realized that cultivating a strong social support network had already ensured he would not be a failure.

Too often we worry about our ability to provide for ourselves or our families and use the level at which we provide as the barometer of success. Not that it isn't important for a family to have food and other basic necessities, but in our society the amount of comforts that go along with them are used to measure "success" more widely than they should be. Will's definition of success resonated with me very solidly. Since coming to Brown, my prospects for material wealth accumulation have dropped from what they were in high school, because I have changed what I want to do for a job. However, at the same time I have gained a significantly stronger network of social support and loving friendship and deepened my appreciation of the family ties that I am blessed with. In this way I consider myself wildly successful as a 21-year-old.

But success should not lead to complacency of thoughts or actions. On the contrary, to borrow an idea from Jonathan Schell, "the joy is in the struggle." For me, that means that I take action and put energy into changing the world because it brings me happiness. For example, I went to a rally for worker's and immigrant's rights on Labor Day that had me marching all over Providence on a gimpy knee, and I loved the energy and emotions of it all. It felt wonderful to know I was finally able to make a positive contribution to the working conditions of Brown food service employees and others around the city. Thursday afternoon I went to a rally for Seth Yurdin, a progressive city council candidate with a democratic primary next week. After meeting him and Jim Dean of Democracy for America I decided to work his phonebank that evening and met some more radical Brown students in the process. Both experiences were difficult and awkward at times, but in the end I felt much better about having gone and done them than I would have if I'd just spent the time in my dorm.

I'm not saying any of this to toot my own horn, because none of it amounts to a whole lot, but the point I'm trying to make is that activism shouldn't be a BURDEN. So many people I know want to change the world in a positive way but just don't feel like they have the time or the energy. My feeling is that if you put the energy in, you will be nourished by that effort and have the ability to continue more than you thought before. Obviously real-world limitations mean this can only be taken so far, but it's a very good reason to try moving forward if you haven't already and to keep doing so if you are an activist on a regular basis right now.