NEW BOOK SNEAK PEEK!

Here's an exclusive excerpt from my forthcoming book 'Worth Fighting For!'

Hey Beautiful Mess Community!

To celebrate us reaching 10,000 subscribers today, here’s an exclusive excerpt from my forthcoming book, Worth Fighting For, arriving April 2nd.

This is called ‘Warning Lights.’

Enjoy!

John

How long has this light been on?

I asked my teenage son, after tossing down the keys to the car I once owned but have since gradually been evicted from. 

“I’m not sure,” he matter-of-factly replied without raising his head from his phone. 

“So, a few hours, a day, a couple of weeks, what?” I asked, hoping elevated volume and more precise inquiries would cause him to share my urgency. 

The unconcerned, still barely audible response came back: “Hmm, I don’t know.” 

Then, almost magically in a kind of “circle of life” moment, I heard the voice of my dearly departed father burst from my mouth as I involuntarily launched into an impassioned and eloquent soliloquy on the seemingly self-explanatory purpose of warning lights and the inherent dangers of not responding to them. I experienced second-hand déjà vu as my words perfectly replicated an ancient kitchen-table lecture my father had once given me, as had his father before him. Instantly, I’d become part of a proud parenting lineage tracing back to the very genesis of automobile notification systems.

My frustration at my son’s incredulity was slightly tempered by the thought that one day a much older version of him might one day find himself similarly exasperated, fiercely interrogating an adolescent who is as laissez-faire and unbothered as he seems to be in this moment. As I stormed out of the kitchen, I punctuated my diatribe with one final salvo: “The warning lights are there for a reason! Pay attention!” Pushing through the front door, I called the repair shop, hoping we could still save the car without me having to sell a kidney. 

Truly, nothing is new under the sun for the intricate and delicate vehicles you and I are inhabiting here on this meandering, unpredictable journey of being human. We ignore the warnings and alarms within us all the time. Physical fatigue comes, and instead of slowing down, cutting back, or—God forbid—taking a nap, we down another cup of coffee or energy drink hoping to buy just enough of an artificial turbo boost to thrust us back into the day for a few more hours. Or we feel a sustained anxiousness residing within us, and rather than attending to it by pausing to breathe or seeing a therapist or journaling the angst away we double down, betting on a slot-machine refreshing of our social media feed to suddenly raise our emotional reserves and temporarily pull us out of our prolonged funk. Or perhaps our partner points out our recent emotional unavailability and we grow defensive or rationalize away their assessment in an attempt to avoid admitting that we’ve been sedated by a daily toxic cocktail of bad news, outrage addiction, and cultivated worry.

When it comes to engaging the brokenness around us, there is a fragile line between noble perseverance and careless hubris—and it’s an hourly, almost momentary task to stay on the right side of the danger zone. If you’re here, you may be well in the red. 

As we go about the work of being compassionate human beings in days when cruelty is trending, there are two wounds we need to be constantly mindful of and sensitive to: the wounds of the world and the wounds we sustain attending to them. The former are usually much better at getting our attention than the latter are. The very empathy that enables us to notice the pain in our path makes us vulnerable to injury as we travel it. It causes us to have proximity to other people’s trauma and we cannot enter those places unscathed. The best we can do is to pay attention to the signs and mitigate the damage, and we’re going to need to slow down in order to do that. There is a stillness that is both necessary and elusive if we want to stay compassionate for the long haul.

Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “We do so much, we run so quickly, the situation is difficult, and many people say, ‘Don’t just sit there, do something.’ But doing more things may make the situation worse. So, you should say, ‘Don’t just do something, sit there.’ Sit there, stop, be yourself first, and begin from there.”

We’re so used to mistaking activity for productivity that Hanh’s advice might feel counterintuitive at first, yet slowing our pace might be where the wisdom is. Sometimes, with so much pain vying for your attention and the perpetual whirlwind of panic it may be generating within you, perhaps the most important thing you can do for your health and for the world that needs you—is nothing. 

It’s difficult to quantify the physical and emotional toll of the collective hell we’ve all passed through in recent years, the heightened level of awareness that we’ve all had to sustain along the way. We’re learning that trauma resides in our bodies, finding a home in our very physicality but its impact is time-released, which makes it tricky to track. The effects on our systems often manifest down the road well beyond the initial injury. Sure, sometimes we can name precisely who and what the sources of our fatigue and anxieties presently are. More often, our assailants surface months or years later, shape-shifted into something else: a premature retirement, a stress-related heart episode, a marital collapse, a mental health emergency. We may not be able to run a tether directly from these things back to the tribalism and elevated urgency of a cancerous presidency and a planetary heath crisis, but we should know it’s all connected. 

Ultimately, you are the greatest personal resource you have in the fight for a more compassionate planet. Dead people make really lousy activists.

(I mean, that’s about as inactive as you can get.) Doing the work I do, I hear from far too many former empaths and ex damn-givers: lifetime optimists forced into early retirement by a decisive and cataclysmic health breakdown, or from the slow, steady erosion of vigor.

They were once full-throated and passionate revolutionaries now rendered silent and invisible, all because they’ve been hyperaware of the trauma around them and oblivious to the trauma within them until it was too late.

The fact that you’re here tells me you’re not quite there yet.

Pay attention to those warning lights.

This is fight one. 

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