January started off cruel and stayed there.
At least 14 people were killed and dozens more were injured in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day when a driver intentionally slammed his truck into a crowd of people in New Orleans. The suspect died in a shootout with police, leaving families forever shattered and a nation rattled.
Israel’s bombardment in Gaza continues amid cease-fire talks. Russian missiles continue to pummel Ukraine. The world said goodbye to former President Jimmy Carter, whose heart and humanitarianism were a North Star to so many.
And Los Angeles burst into flames.
As of this writing, some 12,300 structures have been damaged or destroyed in the California wildfires that broke out Jan. 7. Around 40,300 acres have burned, at least 24 people have died and more than 100,000 people have had to flee their homes — often never to return.
I was on a Zoom the other day for a writing fellowship where I serve as coach. One of the other coaches had three minutes to leave his home the day before. They were camped out in a hotel. He held up a toy bus that sat next to his laptop — the only thing his son grabbed on the way out.
My former Chicago Tribune colleagues Kim Janssen and his wife, Becky Schlickerman, lost their Altadena home and with it all of the documents that Schlickerman saved from her grandfather, a Holocaust refugee. They were planning to share their home with Schlickerman’s mom, who left Israel last year.
“She’s struggling, to be honest,” Schlikerman told ABC-7 Chicago. “She’s 70, fled her home in Israel and now lost her home here. She’s struggling.”
What do we do with all of this? Help where we can, of course. Donate where we can. Chip away, where we can, at the forces that fuel so much of the cruelty — whether those forces are hatred or intolerance or inequity or climate devastation or all of the above.
But also this: We can refuse to check out. We can stay invested in humanity. We can stay aware of how connected, how similar, how intertwined we all are.
I don’t mean that we shouldn’t take breaks from the news or rest when we’re exhausted. I mean we should resist the very real urge — I know I have it — to wall ourselves off from what’s painful. To ascribe blame where grace and empathy belong. To pretend the suffering is off in the distance, when of course it’s not. “All flourishing is mutual,” botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us in “Braiding Sweetgrass.”
That’s harder than it should be. Our hearts can only take so much. But maybe we do this:
Maybe we take a “yes, and” approach to the news. It is an improv principle popularized by the Second City’s Kelly Leonard (he co-authored the book, “Yes, And,” with Tom Yorton) that encourages collaboration and conversation instead of arguing and discord.
California is in flames. Yes, and people are rushing to put them out. People are losing everything. Yes, and strangers are finding ways to make each other whole.
We’re surrounded by stories of devastating loss. Yes, and we’re also surrounded by stories like the firefighter who noticed a man panicking and unable to move through the gridlock on a rented bike, asked the man for his address, drove to his house and rescued his two dogs.
Our nation is deeply polarized. Yes, and Dallas lawmaker Venton Jones, one of the first out Black gay men elected to the Texas Legislature, just proposed to his partner, Gregory Scott Jr., in front of a crowd in the state capitol after his swearing in. A reminder of progress, a glimmer of hope and a doubling down on love.
I don’t think it’s a distraction to look for beauty and goodness when devastation is all around us. I think it’s necessary — to remind us what’s at stake, to remind us why we’re here, and to remind us of our own power to make more beauty and goodness. Yes, and.
Leonard knows about leaning on improv principles to navigate the cruelest parts of life. His daughter, Nora, was diagnosed with liver cancer when she was 16.
“There’s this saying in improv, ‘Play the scene you’re in, not the scene you want to be in,’” Leonard told me at the time. “So we played the scene we’re in.”
Leonard and his wife, Anne Libera, filled Nora’s final days with a community of love and laughter and support. And when she died at age 17, they created a public playground — Nora’s Sun and Moon Park — where her spirit would keep running and chasing and living.
“We don’t need to pretend this isn’t hard and we don’t need to pretend we don’t feel the deepest of pains for not having her physically with us,” Leonard said in 2019. “But I think it’s important to express the gratitude that she was here. That she was a gift to all of us and she will continue to be a gift if we remember to live our lives with kindness, resolve and play.”
Yes, this year is off to a devastating start. Yes, we are heartbroken.
And we are capable of healing — ourselves and each other.
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