I have never once changed someone’s mind in a comment section.
I have, however, lost an entire Tuesday evening trying.
If you have been anywhere near a screen, a dinner table, a team meeting, a client lunch or a group text lately, you may have noticed the temperature. It is election week. The country feels like it is split down the middle, and both halves are fairly sure the other half has lost its mind.
Here is the part I keep bumping into. Roughly half of us are about to be disappointed. Not mildly. Deeply. And the other half will be relieved, and will try very hard not to gloat, and will mostly fail.
And then it will be Wednesday. We will still have to run the meeting. Still take the client call. Still love the brother-in-law.
So I have been asking myself a question that is not about who wins.
How do we stay kind this week, keep our light on, and not give up one inch of what we actually believe?
Because I do not think the answer is “care less.” I have tried caring less. It lasted about eleven minutes.
The part we were hoping nobody would say out loud
Most of us are quietly certain we are the reasonable ones.
I know this because I am also quietly certain I am the reasonable one. And I have a feeling the woman I muted last Thursday feels the same way about herself.
A research team asked Americans to guess what people on the other side actually believe. Then they asked the other side. We were wrong. Both directions. We assumed far more of “them” held extreme views than actually do.
The detail that got me was this. The people who followed the news most closely guessed the worst.
Read that again. The more we watch, the less accurately we see each other.
So the picture in our heads of “the other side” may be a highlight reel. The loudest ten percent, on a loop, with music. Meanwhile the actual person across the conference table mostly wants:
- a quieter street
- a kitchen that works
- for their kid to be okay
Same as us.
A man in 1911 had some thoughts about politicians
I went back to Wallace Wattles this week, the fellow who wrote The Science of Being Great more than a century ago.
He wrote, and I am quoting here, that “our politicians are a petty lot.”
In 1911.
So if you were hoping this was a new problem, I am sorry to report it is not. People have been exhausted by the people in charge for as long as there have been people in charge.
But that is not what Wattles was actually getting at. He was not complaining. He was pointing somewhere else. He said we have “nothing to keep right but” ourselves, and that no combination of circumstances can keep us down if we keep our own attitude right.
He also had this stubborn habit of saying “all’s right with the world.” Not finished. Not perfect. Right, and still being built. He looked at the strikes and the trusts and the mess of his own time and saw a world mid-construction, not a world falling apart.
I will be honest, some weeks I can only hold that for about a minute. But I keep coming back to it, because the alternative is handing my peace to a group of people who, by his own account, were a petty lot a hundred years ago and have not sent word that they have changed.
Here is how I have come to say it to myself.
Our good was never on the ballot.
Who sits in which chair may change what is harder or easier for a while. It does not change what we are made of, what we are capable of, or who we get to be on Wednesday morning. The Power breathing you is greater than any circumstance, situation, or condition. I believe that, and I believe it the day after an election too.
You cannot shovel out darkness
There is a line that makes the rounds every so often, usually with Einstein’s name attached, though he almost certainly never said it. The idea is simple anyway. There is no such thing as darkness. There is only light, and the absence of it.
You cannot scoop darkness out of a room. You cannot argue it out. You cannot shame it out. You can only turn on a light.
Dr. King said it better than anyone, and he did actually say it: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
I think this may be the whole thing.
When I am furious at “the other side,” it does not feel like a presence. It feels like a hole. Something is missing. And if I am honest about what is missing, it is usually not information. It is love. Warmth. The willingness to see a person instead of a position.
The negativity we are swimming in this week may not be a force we have to defeat. It may just be an absence we get to fill.
That is a very different job. Fighting darkness is exhausting and you never win. Bringing light is small, repeatable, and oddly fun.
When our convictions turn the lights off
I want to be careful here, because I am not asking anyone to believe less.
Our convictions are not the problem. I have mine and I am keeping them, thank you. The problem is when conviction quietly turns into scorekeeping, and scorekeeping turns into a kind of blindness.
It shows up at work before it shows up anywhere else. The boardroom, the listing appointment, the Zoom with the vendor, the front desk, the sales floor. Anywhere two people have to get something done together.
- The client whose car has the sticker, and we decide in the parking lot what kind of person they are.
- The vendor who said one thing on social media, and now every email from her reads as hostile.
- The woman on our team who “just asks questions,” and we have quietly stopped putting her on the good projects.
We think we are seeing clearly. We may just be seeing one thing, very brightly, and nothing around it.
The sneaky part is that it feels like integrity. Standing firm. Not compromising. But if our “standing firm” means we can no longer see the human in front of us, the lights are off, and we are the ones who turned them off.
I have done this. I have sorted a whole roomful of people by one bumper sticker and missed the one who was about to become a friend. Useful skill, the sorting. Until it isn’t.
So what do we do with this?
No side-switching. No pretending we do not care. Three small places to begin.
- Keep the conviction, drop the scorecard. Say it plainly, to ourselves, before the week gets loud: My good is not on the ballot. Then act like it. Vote, speak, care, do the thing. And then let the result be the result, without letting it decide who we get to be.
- Find the one thing they want that we want too. There is always one. A safe kid. A fair shake. A Thursday with no surprises. We do not have to agree on the road to notice we are headed for the same town.
- Shine on purpose, at someone whose sign we don’t like. Not a lecture. Not a hint. One kind thing, aimed deliberately at a person we have been sorting. Hold the door. Send the referral. Ask about their mother. Watch what happens to the hole.
None of this requires anyone to be wrong. It only requires us to turn a light on and see who is actually there.
Wednesday morning
Half of us will be disappointed this week. Maybe you. Maybe me.
Disappointment is allowed. Grief is allowed. Muting the group chat is, frankly, encouraged.
But I would love for us to come back to this. Change has never once arrived neatly. Every real transformation I have ever been part of, in a life or a business or a family, came through a stretch that looked like chaos from the inside. The mess is not proof that it is broken. Sometimes it is proof that it is moving.
So here is the question I am sliding across the table this week. The coffee is still warm.
Okay, Rosemary. Where exactly is your light in all of this?
Not your opinion. Your light.
If this week has you feeling further from people you love, or further from yourself, than you would like to be, I would love to talk. I offer a free discovery session where we can look at what is actually going on, what you want, and what a step forward could look like. No pressure. No pitch. Nobody checking which way you vote. Just someone sitting on your side of the table.
With love,
Rosemary Gibson
