DORCAS CHENG-TOZUN, author of Social Justice for the Sensitive Soul (Broadleaf), wanted to be an “unceasing voice” for social justice. “And while I was busy saving the world,” she writes, “I would also be the kind of person who’d happily sacrifice anything for a good cause.” But 10 months after Cheng-Tozun moved from the U.S. to China to set up an operations office for her spouse’s solar business, thrilled at the possibility of providing affordable electricity to billions of people, she experienced the “worst and longest panic attack” of her life. For more than a year, she could do “little more than sleep and cry and journal.” A crucial, difficult question arose: “Why can’t I handle what everyone else seems to be managing perfectly well?”
For Trish O’Kane, author of Birding to Change the World (Ecco), the breaking point was Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed her New Orleans home and neighborhood. “After a disaster,” O’Kane reflects, “you just can’t do as much. Nor should you. You need time to think, to ponder ... I needed a great slowing down.” She took up knitting, spent long hours outdoors on the ground “watching the clouds change shape and bumblebees loading their back legs with pollen and the yard birds going about their business.
Like Cheng-Tozun’s year of sleeping, crying, and journaling, these months surfaced life-changing questions for O’Kane. “I could feel my question changing,” O’Kane writes, “from What should I do? to How should I be?”
In their respective books, Cheng-Tozun and O’Kane write from the other side of activist burnout — something Cheng-Tozun experienced after working for multiple social justice organizations, and O’Kane after working in human rights journalism in conflict areas, both for many years. Both writers ponder how to change, heal, and move forward. Birdwatching was the gateway for O’Kane, while Cheng-Tozun found herself reflecting on sensitivity, introversion, and the many ways people are wired with different gifts to offer. They have different backgrounds and stories — Cheng-Tozun is now a writer and consultant who most recently worked for a Christian nonprofit that equips BIPOC contemplative activists; O’Kane is an environmental educator who created the “Birding to Change the World” program at University of Wisconsin-Madison — but both authors offer a similar invitation to those who yearn to make a difference: Learn to embody gentler, more sustainable ways of doing so.
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