I briefly waltzed with the idea of giving up last month. Anyone who has been campaigning for more than about five minutes will know the feeling. What on earth am I doing? What have I achieved? Isn’t it all inevitable? Out of my control?
The temptation, the longing for a quiet life is sometimes hard to ignore. If I give up on trying to do my tiny, well-nigh invisible part in the fight to get global action on climate action, if I stop worrying about the ethical treatment of animals, social injustice, wars fought for the wrong reasons, the homeless, the abused, the neglected… would it make any difference at all? Most of the time I find it hard to believe that it would.
And after the recent rash of bad news stories - we’ve passed the tipping point, the arctic ice is past the point of rescue, British wildlife is about to get it in the neck - it really does seem like a moment to just abandon hope. I find myself longing not to worry.
You see, then my own life would be substantially more comfortable. I could stop reading newspapers, stop recycling and walking, stop giving away money and time and anxiety. I could start flying again, drive whenever I wanted without worrying, I could leave the lights on day and night and whack the heating up high instead of waddling around in jumpers and scarves and blankets.
I don’t think there are easy answers to this problem. It would be nice to wake up every morning filled with certainty and a sense of destiny, to go out like Joan of Arc or Ralph Nader. But they are the exceptions, not the rule. The rest of us odd creatures known as humans are plagued by uncertainties. As Milan Kundera writes in the Unbearable Lightness of Being (probably my favourite book of all time) “we can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come… What happens but once… might as well not have happened at all.” I will never know whether it would be better to give up, to relax, or to carry on fretting and being anxious about things it is very possible I can do nothing about at all.
Do I think we can achieve a global deal on climate change? I don’t know. I’m not always as optimistic as I’d like. Do I think we can stop the Israelis bombing the Palestinians? I don’t know. Nothing I do is going to make any difference, and yet it feels so wrong to be so helpless. I know that some people dismiss this sort of thing as the preoccupation of “bleeding heart liberals”: are they right? Am I just self indulgent? Should I just focus on my home and my children and earning some proper money?
But. There is one thing I do know. I am very sure that what I like most about my fellow humans is the way we look after each other. I love those moments when someone picks up the book you dropped and hands it over with a smile, or steps back when you’re both heading for the office kettle at the same time. I tear up when I see a father carrying his small daughter down the street, or when I see two long-married OAPs helping each other through shop doors. I love it when you see strangers talking on a train - a young man talking to an elderly woman perhaps, with respect and tenderness. In fact tenderness is the word I am searching for… I love the moments when we glimpse our own tender hearts in other people’s faces.
And I’m not ready to give up a tender heart just yet. For my own sake. Does anyone have a banner they need help painting?
Words: Bibi van der Zee.
Photo: Google Images 'helping hands'