The Script Is Not Written

I WRITE THIS two months before the November 2024 U.S. presidential election, knowing that it will land with you, dear readers, after all the votes are in and the course for the next four years is likely set. My insides lurch thinking about the potential outcomes. We are in the middle of the decisive decade for large-scale action to mitigate the worsening effects of climate change. Going in one direction or the other feels, sometimes, like a turn toward life or death for the planet.

Like many, I have learned to apply lessons from navigating the grief and pain of personal losses to our collective crises. I lost my dad suddenly to colon cancer earlier this year. A few weeks later, my mom was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Grasping for predictability amid the unknown, I tried to superimpose my dad’s illness onto my mom’s future. It did not help. My anxiety skyrocketed.

What helped, instead, was applying what Zen practitioners call “beginner’s mind.” A beginner has no background knowledge about a situation. They have no expectations for how things might unfurl. Approaching a situation as a beginner can open pathways that experts did not see.

Physician Rachel Naomi Remen, in Kitchen Table Wisdom, tells of a farmer who was doing unexpectedly well after a grim cancer diagnosis. He approached the doctor the same way he did government soil experts. They told him corn wouldn’t grow in his soil, but, he said, “A lot of the time the corn grows anyway.”

What would it look like if we approached the election outcomes like this farmer did his prognosis? Whoever is in the Oval Office next year is one factor shaping our collective future. But the real work is happening on the ground, in the soil our own hands are tilling.

While I was in Texas recently supporting my mom during her first round of chemotherapy, I met with my best friend, who is going through her own personal crisis. “All this makes me question,” I told her, “if love is really at the center of the universe.”

“And?” she asked.

“I want it to be,” I replied.

Later, I thought of the way scriptures describe followers of Christ. Jesus calls us friends instead of servants (John 15:15). Paul calls us God’s fellow workers (1 Corinthians 3:9). We are also to be Christ’s body on earth (1 Corinthians 12:27). These passages imbue me with a sense of agency. Our actions are God’s love made manifest.

Following Christ in our tumultuous times isn’t a fatalistic surrender to the pages of a predetermined history. The script is not written, no matter who becomes the next U.S. president. No matter how the doctors stage my mom’s cancer. I want to approach these coming years with a beginner’s mind — open to breathtaking surprises, improbable breakthroughs, and unforeseen beauty.

In our shared societal task of turning from death to life, I don’t want to take failure — or success — as a given. As I later texted my best friend, “In choosing love, we are co-creating the kind of universe we want.” Every single moment.