Yesterday I had a singularly unproductive day fishing. I tried moving around the lake, fishing with different lures and bait, and targeting the different species of fish I knew were there. Not a bite. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. It was frustrating, I only had one day off to fish the entire week and here I was repeatedly casting out and reeling in, or patiently waiting to feel a tug on my line, catching nothing. But I’ve had many such unproductive days before and will have many after, and I reminded myself of the hackneyed, but nonetheless true, adage: “It’s called fishing, not catching.” Even on a good day of catching, the majority of your time is spent just fishing. And on a bad day, like yesterday, it is all fishing not catching. To stay fishing, day after day, through good days and bad ones, you have to learn to love the process: looking over the water, strategizing the shoreline, psychologizing the fish, casting and retrieving, the waiting. With luck and skill, the process might yield a product and you’ll catch a fish, but if you don’t enjoy the process of fishing itself you might as well quit because the ratio between fishing and catching is mighty slim.
As an activist, you rarely win. You can work for months, even years, on a campaign and not see any result. Even when you win and a new policy is enacted, or a fair contract signed, or there’s a palpable shift in public opinion, it can all be undone in a moment and you have to start again. To remain an activist over the long haul, you have to learn to love the work itself. This means making the work lovable: activism should be about pleasure, play, and celebration more than the sacrifice, seriousness, and righteousness that too often characterizes the practice of doing activism. Embracing the process also means acknowledging the long game. Yes, we must keep our eyes on the prize, and have faith that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, but we also need to recognize that the path is really long. Most of all, learning to love the process of activism entails a certain separation from its product. This is what my friend, the master activist L.A. Kauffman, once called “existential activism.” You don’t act to shape and change the world for the surety of any end result, but because to not act would mean ceasing to have a meaningful existence. It’s called activism, not winning.