It's Not All on You
One of the themes of our project is the belief that mindfulness tools can help people working in politics, policy, and media work more effectively and avoid burning out when faced with inevitable challenges and setbacks.
Part of that comes from widening the lens through which we view the world and our work within it. Our very first guest, Jeff Krehely [https://mindfulnessinpolitics.substack.com/p/boosting-motivation-purpose-and-creativity], said it best when he described political work as: not a sprint, not a marathon, but rather a relay race in which we all have to work together and rely on each other to succeed.
Our recent conversation with Elijah Zimmerman [https://mindfulnessinpolitics.substack.com/p/why-being-hard-on-yourself-backfires], the executive director of the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion, hit on a similar point. As he put it: if someone else were in your role, even with a different skill set, would the system still be difficult?
These framings help us remember that it is not all on us to solve and to fix and we can feel more compassionate toward ourselves and better prepared to continue doing the work over the long-term.
Gabor Maté [https://drgabormate.com/], a renowned physician and author who specializes in childhood development and addiction has written extensively about the role of early childhood experiences in shaping our beliefs and views of the world. He argues that what feels like “objective reality” to us is actually filtered through our developmental history. Someone who experienced childhood abandonment might interpret a partner’s need for independence as rejection, while someone raised with enmeshment might see it as healthy boundary-setting.
To put it bluntly: we don’t live in the same world. We live in the world that our early experiences have conditioned us to see.
Add to that reality the siloed media systems we live in and the tribal divisions we celebrate, and we’re left with a system where genuine consensus feels nearly impossible. Even when we agree on shared values, our differing interpretive lenses mean we often can’t agree on the solutions—or even on what the problems are.
This isn’t mean to discourage or depress us, but to ensure we’re clear-eyed about the system we’re operating in. Because that clarity helps us do work that actually resonates.
We can’t control the system we’re working in. We can’t control how others will interpret our work through their own conditioned lenses. But we can control how we show up. We can choose to be humane and compassionate—toward ourselves and others. We can remember that this is a relay race, not a solo marathon. And we can ask ourselves Elijah’s question: would this system still be difficult for someone else in my role?
The answer, almost always, is yes. And somehow, that makes it easier to keep going.
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