Finding a Different Metric
Efforts, not results. Ease, not outrage.
It’s been a really shit few weeks in the world, hasn’t it. Every week in Trumplandia is shit, but this Iran stuff has been next level. Reading the news is like watching a tennis match between World War III and AI, while ICE, evil tech, and cost of living round robin on another court. Times are always uncertain, but what we are living through now really feels like it might be off the charts.
Meanwhile, last week I went to my new GP (Americans, that’s what we call going to the doctor over here), where we had one of those fun conversations about hormones you have at my age. When we got to the part where I complain about how difficult it is to shift any weight, she asked why it bothers me.
Um, vanity? I feel more like myself with smaller arms and a narrower waist?
What if, she suggested, you evaluate the state of your body not by what it looks like but by what it’s able to do.
I didn’t like this suggestion. I didn’t want to be sensible. I just wanted to look more like I used to.
But her words have stayed with me and started to do their work. I can run. I can lift things. I spent an entire day out on my mountain bike on Monday. I’ve been through a long period of illnesses and injuries, and I am, if not necessarily on the other side, enjoying a break in the clouds. How great is that.
Finding a different metric for evaluating the state of my body is making me feel differently about it. And, because I love a good metaphor, it’s also got me thinking about other ways this kind of paradigm shift-in-thinking can help. What other metrics could do with some tweaking?
A year ago, the way I evaluated my response to the MAGA walls closing in was to ask myself, what am I doing to change things? And are my efforts working? I think many of us did.
Now, I still want to be an agent of change, but the intractability of authoritarianism’s enablers is much clearer than it was. These clowns just keep digging their heels in. Reason and compassion carry no weight with them. Despite the overabundance of evidence that the US is being run by a madman, he’s still their madman.
So I’ve needed to change my metric. I still ask, what am I doing to change things, but I no longer ask if my efforts are working. I keep my focus on what is within my realm of control. Action, yes. Results, not so much.
In a long-game like this one, the job of the resistance is simply to continue to exist.
The other shift I’ve made is in how I evaluate my response to these twisted times. I used to focus on outrage. I felt like a measure of my success in staying present with what is happening was to sustain a level of outrage proportional to events. The result was that I just kept turning the dial up. I felt encouraged to do this by certain people I used to subscribe to here on Substack, who just want us to be ANGRY ALL THE TIME.
I tried that. It’s exhausting.
Outrage is not fuel for my tank. It’s a hole where my energy leaks out.
So now I use a different metric. How much ease am I able to find in spite of all the reasons to be full of grief and anger? And what kind of knock-on effect can my ease have?
A former version of myself would have seen this approach as a kind of defeat. But she was younger and thinner, and she hadn’t lived through this yet. She didn’t understand that one can be both angry and happy, both worried and joyful — and that the ability to be all of these things is not a weakness but a strength. Shifting the metric from results to effort, from outrage to ease, from appearance to ability changes nothing about what is happening yet it changes everything about how I feel.
What metrics can you change?
Postcard from my garden
From the archives
Writing today’s post, I found myself thinking about what I wrote at the start of this year on staying human.
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A detail that stuck with me is how your GP’s words had impact whether you liked them or not. They went to work. I like the idea that managing exposure to words - content and dosage - matters. Also, where you focus. Today I’m gathering data that I am loved: the coffee my husband made for my early flight, the luggage tag my friend gave me, the TSA agent who showed up for work despite more pay problems and chatted so pleasantly.
Such a useful reminder (as always) Laura, thank you. Reminds me of Joanna Macy’s hope as a verb, regardless of outcome.