A couple of years ago, I went to a workshop about how nonprofit organizations can effectively evaluate the impact of their work. The speaker at this workshop, Dr. Marc Langlois, told a particularly impactful story that stuck with me. It was about kayaking.

If you’re kayaking on a river upstream against the current and you need to take a break, you can’t just stop paddling. If you stop paddling, the water will take you with it and you’ll lose any progress you’ve made. What you have to do is paddle yourself over to an eddy – a place where the current isn’t so strong – so you can hold on to a rock or something and stop paddling for a minute without being pulled backward. There’s a term for it, it’s called “eddying out”. 

The thing is, eddying out isn’t easy. Presumably you’re tired already which is why you need a break and navigating your kayak across a heavy current into an eddy is precarious and really, really tough. 

You have to work for it.

I thought about Marc’s story the other day as I was trying to make sense of the protests in the US and around the world. The first time I heard about George Floyd was on a friend’s Instagram account. She’s originally from the US and has family there so she always has one eye on the news from our neighbours. 

I followed the link in her feed to an article. Then another, and another. A few days later my Instagram feed was flooded with messages of support and calls to action. 

It’s not enough to feel sad. We have to act. 
Allies don’t stay silent.
If you’re doing nothing, then you’re on the side of the oppressor.

Despite feeling horrified and angry and so effing sad about George Floyd's life being taken like that, and despite being wholeheartedly in support of the ongoing fight against systemic racism in the US (not to mention here in Canada), when I read these calls to action my first response was clear and distinct… hostility. 

In an instant, I went from crying over the injustice of it all to giving social media the finger. 

I’ve felt this kind of thing before. It happens pretty often, really. My face gets hot, my chest gets tight, I feel ashamed, I feel defensive. It usually means that I’ve come up against something important. Something that I need to push through. Because on the other side there’s something I need to see. Something I need to do. 

I’m reading Steven Pressfield’s War of Art right now and was nodding my head furiously as he described the sorts of things that bring about these kinds of feelings, which he labels Resistance (with a capital R). He sums it up like this:

“…any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term grown, health, or integrity. Or, expressed another way, any act that derives from our high nature instead of our lower.”

When I found myself feeling rage-y and resistant as I scrolled through messages on my Instagram feed telling me I should be doing more, I knew I had a choice.

I could either give in to the resistance and let the current take me, or I could eddy out.

Giving in to resistance is easy. It can look like I’m doing a lot but really, I’m just letting the water carry me. I call all my friends and tell them why I’m right and everyone else is wrong. I comb the web for articles that support my position. I construct an iron-clad argument as to why what I’m doing is exactly what I should be doing. It feels good at the time but like scratching a mosquito bite, it just makes the resistance worse.

Eddying out, on the other hand, feels not at all good. It’s not easy, but it’s always worth it. It involves asking myself one question over and over again: What am I resisting?

I thought back to that social media post and what it was that prompted my rage-y response. Was it being told what to do? Was it hearing that I haven’t been doing enough? Was it the idea of speaking out? Was it the thought of protesting? Every question was a clumsy, effortful paddle stroke toward the eddy. One stroke at a time, I fought my way out of the current. 

It was messy, it was unflattering, it was frustrating, and it was done mostly alone. I asked question after question, following ever answer like a trail of breadcrumbs. One of those answers was this:

I want the bigger picture. 

I’d read a lot about all the things I should be doing, but I hadn’t read anything that told me how exactly those things would help. I wanted someone to draw a line for me from my actions to fixing a system that’s so, so broken. I wanted to take my direction from someone who knows the history, who can place the current issues in a larger context, and who has the information and expertise to be able to speak in a productive way about what actions we need to prioritize if we want to make progress.

When I realized the disconnect, I did some reading and came across Barak Obama’s article in The Medium. His words, as they so often do, put it all into a context I could understand and act on. 

“I’ve heard some suggest that the recurrent problem of racial bias in our criminal justice system proves that only protests and direct action can bring about change, and that voting and participation in electoral politics is a waste of time. I couldn’t disagree more. The point of protest is to raise public awareness, to put a spotlight on injustice, and to make the powers that be uncomfortable; in fact, throughout American history, it’s often only been in response to protests and civil disobedience that the political system has even paid attention to marginalized communities. But eventually, aspirations have to be translated into specific laws and institutional practices— and in a democracy, that only happens when we elect government officials who are responsive to our demands…

So the bottom line is this: if we want to bring about real change, then the choice isn’t between protest and politics. We have to do both. We have to mobilize to raise awareness, and we have to organize and cast our ballots to make sure that we elect candidates who will act on reform.”

My nervous system immediately felt calmer. 

The current of emotions subsided. I’d found some perspective, some clarity. I’d reached the eddy, and now that my prefrontal cortex was back online (i.e. I wasn’t in fight/flight/freeze/freak-the-eff-out mode) I could accept that yes, I can do more and I want to do more.

Then I took a step. I wasn’t sure it was the right step. In fact, it’s likely that tomorrow I’ll realize that I could have chosen better. Every single thing I’ve watched or read over the past few days has challenged what I think I know, and with every challenge I find myself paddling back up the River of Carolyn’s Emotions again. That good ol' RCE.

This is what it’s like for me to “sit with discomfort”. It’s not passive. It’s not just sitting with my feelings, inert. It’s active, it’s paddling my ass off trying to find the way through. Not so I’ll feel better, but so that I can find the clarity I need to move forward.

It’s an important skill to develop, no matter what it is we’re trying to change. If we want to do better, if we want things to be different than they are now, there’s just no way around it. 

Doing nothing feels easy, but it doesn’t feel good (not for long, anyway). Doing anything feels better than doing nothing, but it takes forever to get where we want to go if we get there at all. Focusing all our effort on one or two critical things, even if they’re hard, will not only get us where we want to go, it’ll get us there faster. 

I don’t know about you, but I’m all for getting there faster. 

C.

PS. A final point about eddies. An eddy is created when there’s an obstacle that the river has to go around. Without the obstacle, there would be no eddy. 

At the risk of stretching this metaphor waaaaay too far, I think our higher self, the best part of us, is the thing standing in the path of our resistance and creating a space where – if we’re willing to work for it – we can stop fighting for a minute, reflect, and get clear.

As I stood in today's protest in London I thought, isn't that what's happening here too? Our city's best self - it's people - standing in the path of the current, making space for change.

If we're willing to work for it.