Write Until the World Makes Sense

And Choose Kindness

At the beginning of the year, I put a two stickers on my journal. One says, “Choose Kindness.” It reminds me of my mom. If she was still with us, she might have put up a “Choose Kindness” billboard by now. In fact, every time I choose kindness, I realize that she is still with us. The other sticker says, “Write until the world makes sense.” The journal is now full. The world still does not make sense.

But I’m not giving up. I started another journal on July 1. I journal almost every Sunday morning on Zoom with a group of wonderful people, most of whom I’ve never met. I write sporadically through the week as well. No matter what the prompts, I almost always circle around to questions that I will never fully answer. What is going on in the world? What impact am I having? How should I live? How are my people doing? And of course, who am I now?

I go back and reread my journals every few months. 2025 has brought more questions than answers, and the unanswered questions have left me ranging widely across the negative side of the feelings wheel. I’m anxious and frustrated and angry and sad and resentful. My therapist assures me that I’m not alone. Lots of her patients are struggling with the uncertainty in the world right now. It is too much to write myself through.

This has led me to search for other strategies to make sense of the world and decide what I might be able to do from my small corner of it. Unsurprisingly, I often turn to reading - from research to newspapers to Substacks to books. I read first to understand. How did we come to this moment in history? What might the impact be? This weekend, I’ve spent time with Arlie Russell Hochschild in her book, Stolen Pride.

Hochschild is a professor emeritus in sociology at the University of California-Berkeley. I have read almost every book she has written. I became fascinated by emotional labor in graduate school and devoured The Managed Heart. As a professor-mom, I felt seen when I read Hochschild’s brilliant insights about managing work and family in The Second Shift and The Time Bind. And in 2016, I turned to Strangers in Their Own Land, a sociological study of Lake Charles, Louisiana and the Tea Party movement to begin to understand the results of the presidential election.

Stolen Pride extends Hochschild’s research into the political landscape in the United States. In this book, she takes us to Pikeville, Kentucky, a small town in Appalachia. Despite the fact that 80 percent of the district voted Republican in the 2016 election, Hochschild shows us a much more nuanced picture as she explores the community’s response to a white nationalist march in 2017. Her analysis of what the residents of Pikeville have lost and the variety of ways they have made sense of job loss and poverty helps to explain voting behavior.

I’m about halfway through the book and am anxious to see what conclusions Hochschild draws about the way forward. Based on her analysis thus far and insights from Strangers in Their Own Land, it seems clear that we must not only address lost jobs and crushing poverty, but also counter stories that blame others - often others who are in similar situations - for this “stolen pride.”

The second strategy that I am using to make sense of the world is watching documentaries, especially short docs. Documentaries are having a moment. I got hooked after having lunch with my friend Erin earlier this year. She had just been to FilmScene to see all five short docs that were nominated for Academy Awards.

“You’ve got to watch them,” she told me. “I don’t know what it was, but they really impacted me.” After talking for an hour about the topics and the strategies the filmmakers used, I was convinced. I watched all five and listened to interviews with the filmmakers on the Top Docs podcast. Erin and I have been talking about them ever since.

Our favorite was I Am Ready, Warden, a documentary about a death penalty case in Texas. In 37 minutes, we meet multiple people with nuanced perspectives. The filmmakers weave these perspectives together to create a rich dialogue - an attempt to create shared meaning that doesn’t rely on easy answers.

In an editorial in yesterday’s New York Times, Maureen Dowd writes about the importance of dialogue, citing the correspondence between Jefferson and Adams in the last 14 years of their lives as they attempted to resolve their political feuds. She interviews Ken Burns, who has an upcoming documentary on the American Revolution. Burns says: “The best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story. Good stories are a kind of benevolent Trojan horse. You let them in, and they add complication, allowing you to understand that sometimes a thing and its opposite are true at the same time.”

It is this type of complex thinking that is modeled in good documentary. It is the stories that are contained within that help me understand situations that I don’t have direct experience with. Documentaries help me make sense of the world in a way that is not limited by my own experience.

Finally, perhaps counterintuitively, I have also turned to poetry. This feels indulgent. What good does poetry do in times like this? In fact, Dunya Mikhail acknowledges this in her poem, “My Poem Will Not Save You,” which begins like this:

Remember the toddler lying face down
on the sand, and the waves gently receding
from his body as if a forgotten dream?

My poem will not turn him onto his back
and lift him up
to his feet
so he can run
into a familiar lap
like before.

Mikhail apologizes again and again for the things her poem will not do before closing with this observation:

I don’t know why the birds

sing

during their crossings

over our ruins.

Their songs will not save us,

although, in the chilliest times,

they keep us warm,

and when we need to touch the soul

to know it’s not dead,

their songs

give us that touch.

This is why I read poetry: to feel deeply, “to touch the soul / to know it’s not dead.” I believe that we have to understand with our minds and with our hearts if we are to make sense of the world and choose kindness.