We’re All Heroes in the Making

I learned to start courageous conversations. You can, too.

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Watching the news without getting the story

While I was growing up in the suburbs of Chicago in the 1970s and 80s, we watched the news every night. Despite that, I failed to learn anything about the state of our world.

I don’t recall ever discussing the news with my parents or in school. (Unless you count teachers wheeling TV carts into our Catholic school classrooms to show the space shuttle launch and the Pope’s funeral.)

I’ve spent most of my life avoiding conversations about politics and world events because I didn’t want to sound stupid.

Running for my life left me searching for meaning.

Running uptown in the toxic cloud with what felt like all of Manhattan moments after the Twin Towers collapsed was the first time the news felt real to me.

It was also the first time I felt the fear and uncertainty many people in wartorn places experience daily. I was shocked and confused. The U.S. had always seemed invincible, and I had no idea why anyone would want to attack us.

In an effort to make meaning out of that day and recover a sense of something bigger than my own fears, I quit my job as an art director at Macy’s and started teaching high school English and art in the Bronx.

Nearly two decades after that, my family and I were sheltering in place and watching the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Once again, I found myself trying to make sense of the times we were witnessing.

Valerie Kaur and Dream Corps were forming discussion groups for See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love. I signed up to lead one in hopes of connecting with other moms who were feeling the brokenness of our world and wanting to help.

Reading Valerie’s words, I began to understand the fear anyone who appeared to be Muslim must have felt in the days, months, and years following 9–11. I remembered moving away from men wearing turbans on the Subway—unaware of the prejudice driving my fear.

Leading that group and co-leading a few other antiracist book circles helped me overcome my fear of challenging conversations.

Making new stories out of fear and sorrow

Looking at horrific images from Gaza and other places ravaged by war and climate catastrophes, it’s easy to feel helpless. However, we all have more power and influence than we realize.

We never know who we might reach with an inspiring Medium story. A conversation that begins at your workplace, a school gathering, or in your church, mosque, or synagogue might wake someone up to something they’d never considered.

Letting go of our imposter’s complexes and our egos…

In 2017, using a resume packed with community and school volunteering, I landed an unusual job after 12+ years as a stay-at-home parent. I became the executive director of a nonprofit, leading one side of a conversation that had been labeled our county’s most divisive issue.

To step into that role, I had to overcome many fears. So I took on a “fake it till you make it” mindset and set to learning everything I could about the issue. I felt pressured to prove my worth to the powerful men who had hired me. Throughout the first five decades of my life, I was constantly trying to prove my value in some way.

Too many of us get caught up in the need to prove our worth in a culture that values false images of perfection. We can lose touch with our authentic selves trying to show off or fit in. Remembering who we were before we succumbed to our superficial culture may take a lot of excavating. It’s a worthwhile dig for those of us who want to make a difference.

Finding our beginner’s mind

When we stop pretending to know everything and let go of the need to prove our worth, we can begin again. By remembering our authentic selves and developing what Buddhists call a beginner’s mind, we open pathways for growth and mutual understanding. Zen Habits describes the beginner’s mind as “dropping our expectations and preconceived ideas about something and seeing things with an open mind, fresh eyes, just like a beginner.”

Beginner’s mind can help us recognize that all humans are interdependent, no one holds all the blame, and no one has all the answers

When more people learn to see the world with beginner’s eyes, we will come together to explore how we can make amends for so much damage that’s happened because someone thought they knew better than others.

We need to replace fear with love.

The mudslinging nature of that 2017 divisive county debate (which I stepped into midstream after 12 years of mothering and volunteering) made it difficult to center myself in love. A year later, when the IPCC Report said we had twelve years to save the future, fear drove me to start speaking out on my children’s behalf.

In the years since then, I’ve noticed that although fear can sometimes capture people’s attention, it doesn’t often motivate people to work for change. Let’s rise above fear and start community conversations centered on love.

Together, we can reimagine our broken systems, remember our place in the natural world, and collaborate to envision and create a future in which we all thrive. When 3.5% of us begin to rally for change, anything will be possible. Start dreaming, ask hard questions, and live daily from a center of love for all.

What conversation will you start?

In her 2018 TED Talk, “The Most Important Thing You Can Do to Fight Climate Change: Talk About It,” Christian Climate Scientist Katharine Hayhoe offers the advice to “start from the heart about why it matters to us.” She suggests opening conversations around shared values (e.g., parenting, community, work, love of the outdoors, faith).

Think about the people you interact with, places you frequent, and groups you attend. Where and with whom might you start conversations? How might you help people contemplate the intersectionality of systemic problems? When we choose love over fear, we can begin rising above the polarization that’s fracturing the U.S. and the World.

Here are a few ideas to kickstart courageous conversations.

1. Start a reflective conversation in your faith community. Has your religion played a role in the genocide of indigenous people in the United States or another part of the world? Have members of your worship community been harmed by something faith leaders have or haven’t done? If so, have they issued formal apologies? Better yet, have they begun a dialogue with survivors from the group(s) that were harmed to explore meaningful reparations?
2. Invite colleagues to explore the true cost of your company’s products and/or services. Start a dialogue with people at all levels within your firm. (Be sure to include those who may be cleaning offices or serving meals.) Are any humans or ecosystems harmed by your company’s business model? Are any workers exploited? Are all materials sustainably sourced? Does your company’s production pollute the air, land, or water? What changes might help ensure that your business does the most good and the least harm possible?
3. Start conversations with fellow parents or at school board or PTA meetings. Are children learning about the climate crisis, prejudice, racism, and other challenging topics? Does the curriculum include how the U.S. and other countries in the Global North have allowed the climate crisis to escalate? Does your school’s history curriculum accurately portray how Indigenous People have fought to protect land and water? And how racist policies have turned whole communities into sacrifice zones?
4. Teachers can start conversations that address the eco-anxiety or alienation young people may be experiencing. By connecting class conversations like those mentioned above to meaningful actions (like letter-writing campaigns), teachers can help students find agency and hope. The Institute for Humane Education offers a free Solutionary Guidebook for teachers who want to ease students’ fear of the future. It shows how to research hidden causes of problems and then work with peers to identify and design potential solutions. The Zinn Education Project is another good resource for teachers who want to empower their students.

These conversations must be relational, not transactional.

Begin from a place of empathy and stay open to mutual learning. It can be helpful to start by asking some questions to gauge what the people you are talking with already know about the topic.

Look for things you can learn from them (remember the beginner’s mindset).

We need to look for ways to make difficult conversations less intimidating. Our hope is to inspire people, not paralyze them with fear or remorse. Admit you don’t know everything about a topic. Sharing your desire to learn more by talking with others can be a great way to build community.

Two helpful tips

1. If you are in a small group, be sure you spend at least as much time listening and responding to others as you do talking.
2. If you are presenting to a larger group, remember to include a bit of humor and lots of humility in your approach.

Think about how to enter these conversations without sounding self-righteous. It might be helpful to free write about a few different approaches. We all want to believe we’re living on the right side of history. However, the U.S. and all of the Global North are just beginning to face their white supremacist roots. We all have a lot of learning to do.

If somebody doesn’t have sense enough to turn on the dim and beautiful and powerful lights of love in this world, the whole of our civilization will be plunged into the abyss of destruction. And we will all end up destroyed because nobody had any sense on the highway of history.—Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness. — Archbishop Desmond Tutu

We each have a choice at this evolution point for humanity

Do we stay comfortable with injustice or actively fight for the equitable, antiracist transformations we need to create a just and joyful future for all?

To protect democracy and human rights in these increasingly uncertain times, we need to do more than read our newsfeeds or watch the nightly news. We need to take the initiative to learn how people on all sides of each story are suffering. As we begin talking with others—especially those whose lives are different from our own—we’ll start sensing the commonality and simplicity that underlie the complexities of our world.

By examining our own blindspots and helping our friends and families to see theirs, we can help our communities move beyond the paralyzation of reactionary responses. Remembering the 3.5% rule, we each need to find the courage to step beyond the comfort of neutrality.

For years, I’ve been saying I want to write, but my subconscious sense that I wasn’t smart enough to say anything that mattered kept me silent. I’m learning to conquer that fear. If you’re feeling a similar fear, I’m sure you too can rise above it.

If we don’t protect each other and Mother Earth, who will?

It’s time to let go of our fear and our egos, learn to see with a beginner’s mind, and start courageous conversations to help paint a new vision for our collective future.

Gail McNulty 🕊️ 🌱 is raising three teenagers while getting to know herself and her parents who are in the late stages of life. She writes to explore how we can love our way through these times and work together to create the tomorrow we all want and need. Are you dreaming about the future we can co-create as we save what we love, regenerate what we need, and reimagine how to live our lives in just and joyful ways? If so, Gail would love to connect with you on LinkedIn and Twitter.

A few short videos for inspiration

These short videos offer hopeful glimpses of the future we can create:

1. “What if this Darkness is Not the Darkness of the Tomb but the Darkness of the Womb?” — Valerie Kaur speaking at the National Moral Revival Poor People’s Campaign Watch Night Interfaith Service
2. A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
3. A Message from the Future II: The Years of Repair