Lately, I’ve been waking up at two o’clock in the morning wracked with anxiety. There’s a lot to be anxious about: we are nine months into a pandemic, a madman is in the Whitehouse doing his best to drag this country into an alternate reality, my two sons are “learning” online from home which, in practice, means not really learning much at all, and my own students are despondent about their education and their future and nothing I do to try to arouse their passion seems to be working. It’s 2 am and I need to get more sleep because I am teaching again in the morning, but every time I close my eyes I just recycle the same worries over and over again. To stop this cycling I taught myself a trick: I try and dream of fish. Or fishing to be exact. I imagine myself at water’s edge casting out and reeling in, over and over, repetitively, until I re-channel my thoughts and calm myself down enough to go back to sleep. It’s my version of counting sheep.
For many of the people I work with, activism has very high stakes. If free access to medicines is not won, children will die of diarrhea and malaria. If laws are not changed to legalize sex work, more and more people will become victims of violent abuse at the hands of clients, criminals, and corrupt cops. If climate change is not addressed soon, it’s likely that human life itself will become extinct. These high stakes call for bold moves. Paradoxically, the very intensity of what is at stake often leads to a sort of conservatism: an unwillingness to take chances because we simply don’t have the luxury of taking a risk with a new strategy or tactic. This is natural: even when we know there’s a lot to win, we tend to concentrate on what we might lose. So when working with these activists we create games and exercises to divert them: we lead them to imagine the Utopia they want instead of dwelling upon the problems in front of them, we ask them to come up with multiple impossible tactics in an impossibly short amount of time, and, together, we plan a “practice” campaign and “rehearse” an action. We lower the stakes. With the stakes lowered, something marvelous happens: people loosen up, take risks, and try out things that are creative and new. We become wilder in our thoughts and bolder in our actions and therefore have a better chance of winning those high stakes contests.