Why Are We Doing This Work in the First Place?

Mindfulness is woefully under-appreciated in social justice work.

Far too often I see people lose the plot fighting for something they believe in.

They confuse passion with purpose. They focus on short term goals at the expense of long term vision. They attack and scold and throw bombs without considering the effectiveness of those approaches.

Not enough people are able or willing to get in touch with why they care about the things they are yelling and screaming that they care about.

I get it. Social justice work is exhausting. It can be rewarding one moment and demoralizing the next. It is full of variables and uncertainties and ambiguities that are beyond our control.

Inherent in the need for social justice work to exist is the fact that there are people and organizations and systems and institutions and laws and policies that are socially unjust. That were intentionally designed to be unjust.

A lot of power and privilege and social capital and influence for a lot of people depends on their continual social unjustness.

Fighting for social justice can be slow-going, frustrating, maddening. It takes resiliency and perseverance to stay the course. To not get distracted.

We must remember why we're doing it in the first place.

Mindfulness practice helps us do that.