1. Weakness

Everyone is weak in their own way.

What that means is, you are weak in your own way. Others are weak in their own way.

What that means is, be kind. Be honest, but be kind.

2. Field Organizing

I think one of the most beautiful things about being committed to field organizing is that it forces you to become a better person socially.

I still don’t consider myself to be particularly socially smart in certain very deep respects. I still have got a long, long ways to go.

But I’ll tell you this: I was way, way worse when I first started. The amount of improvement I’ve made in terms of my social intelligence from when I first started my career to now has been absolutely staggering. Night and day difference: organizing has totally transformed me deep into my nerve endings.

Like I said, I’ve got a long, long ways to go. But — and I believe this deep to my core — no matter how socially inept you might be, if you just take enough action, if you just have thousands of organizing conversations every year over many, many years: you. will. get. better.

Having conversations to empower people — many, many, many random people from all backgrounds and walks of life — forces you to learn yourself and forces you to learn how to connect with others more deeply and more honestly.

And I think that that’s quite beautiful. All it takes is commitment. That deep Leftist alienation you feel, if you feel it — organizing can help.

And the above is, to me, that sort of Deep True that words can only begin to convey.

3. Love

I think that in life you have the opportunity to find a small group of people who truly, fully See you for exactly who you are. If you work at it, you can love those people, and those people can love you back, and you’ll both find yourselves in a place where you’re both continually putting the other person first before yourself… where you’re stronger together than the sum of your separate parts.

And I guess I just described love. But anyway: I’ve been reflecting on the true, enormous value of having true confidants with whom you can experience the deepest of intimacies — those people with whom you can feel totally safe and secure to express yourself completely freely. Those people are invaluable, and having gratitude for them seems paramount. It is with each other, in love and security, that we can grow in the deepest of ways.

And this post isn’t particularly original, but I think the cliché-ness of this post signals how eternal and powerful love really is.

4. Chilling Out

If you get a little too steeped into the radical Left, you can start to see every social interaction and every piece of media as deeply problematic and a symptom of everything wrong in the world.

If you get a little too steeped into the emotional health/ self-help/ etc. world, you can start to see everyone as, like, having personal pathologies, and that’s not too good either.

The reality is that the entire world is sort of messed up, and *sort of* everything *is* messed up a little.

The reality is that sort of everyone is dealing with personal issues, and it’s *sort of* true that everyone has at least minor versions of pathologies they should probably work on.

The operative words there are “sort of.” Becoming OK with things in general is probably good for you, and also probably good for the world, even in the pursuit of helping help change people and the world, and a little bit of “everything is OK and alright” mentality is good.