I wrote this yesterday, the day after the inauguration, and want to share it with you as my immediate unvarnished first-thoughts, as a time-capsule of this moment of historical transition.
Pretty immediately after the swearing in of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. as the 46th President of the United States, I began a remote mediation session with a divorcing couple. The husband, commenting on the inauguration, said “that was incredibly healing” to which I couldn’t resist saying “if Biden and his team can heal the nation, together we can heal your family”. His comment set the tone and the attitude for the session, one which involved co-parenting amidst covid long hauling, a marital asset division, child and spousal support. During the session this man told his wife he would never want the mother of his children to be financially unsupported, this from a man who had initially balked at “needing to pay support to someone who’s not doing anything”. Perspective, compassion and words matter.
There is a stark difference between “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”, and “there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it”, the concluding words spoken by Amanda Gorman, America’s 22-year-old poet laureate at yesterday’s inauguration. The emotions evoked by the words spoken are instrumental in the actions they invoke. We all have the power to carefully choose our words to create intentional environments.
I awoke this morning to a friend’s text, in which he said “Your mom would have loved yesterday’s taking of the oath ceremony. I always remember November 1984 when Mondale lost to Reagan. I was then a college student living with your parents. Your mom was so down with the electoral results that evening given the 525-13 electoral vote count. To her it seemed that no one else except her and your dad had voted for Mondale. I did not vote that year even though I was a month away from my nineteenth birthday. At the time, I was not democratically and socially mature enough to realize the importance of voting in our democracy. But seeing your mom so committed to a candidate and cause, regardless of who in fact prevailed, indeed started my internal process of civic awareness. The other thing your mom made me realize following the ‘84 election was how important democracy in the US truly is. The day after Reagan got elected life moved on for her. He was our President. Life and the preservation of our democratic values continued. Just like after yesterday, today life moved on and all Americans have to help make the best of it so that our Nation and democracy continue to be strong. A Nation united by our common democratic values and preservation of constitutional freedoms, gives us room to disagree.” I will add that what this friend humbly refers to as “my internal process of civic awareness” has culminated in him today proudly serving the Nation as a federal judge.
His words got me to thinking about the genesis of my own perspective that all politics are personal, which led me to recalling my November 9, 2016 blogpost in which I remembered the 1858 words spoken by Abraham Lincoln addressing his Republican colleagues in the House of Representatives, “A House Divided against itself cannot stand”. My thoughts now are as they were in 2016 when I also commented about how frightening it was to have a divided Nation, saying further we were being tasked to find our agreements and attend to them first as only then would we stand a change of reconciling our disagreements. I still believe in what I said then, albeit the task seems more readily in reach now being emboldened by elation and not diminished by deflation.
May our words speak to our commitment to take actions. And as we do perhaps it might be helpful to recall both the art of kintsukuroi in which cracks are filled with gold or silver lacquer to make more beautiful a formerly broken piece of pottery, and Leonard Cohen’s iconic words in “Anthem” in which he sings “there is a crack, a crack in everything…. that’s how the light gets in, that’s how the light gets in.
Photo credit to Andy Feliciotti