Energetic Exchange

My sister hates when I talk about energy. She’s a literature person and finds it too vague. What does that mean? she asks.

It is acute and it is vague. It is undeniable if you trust yourself. But in the moment, you rarely know why or what it means.

A friend’s mom came to town. She set my dials out of sync. That’s how I experience it. I have three internal dials—like something you’d find on a ship—tracking balance, orientation, direction. When they start spinning wildly, I know something is wrong.

I was caught off guard. Later, I learned she had excommunicated her son years earlier and blamed his life in California for the rupture.

Ah. That’s why my dials went haywire. The situation—the energy—was toxic.

Yesterday, I was in the park with other families while our eight-year-old girls staged a smartly designed anti-ICE action (ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Passersby were encouraged to smash ice—cathartic—and then served ice-cold sweet victory in the form of lemonade. People who wanted to donate could, and the girls promised the money would reach those organizing or recovering from ICE trauma. One girl had even made a zine of ice comics explaining why ICE needed to be out of our communities.

Yes, friends. It really is that simple. An eight-year-old’s comic zine explains it perfectly.

All morning, passersby engaged with these young activists, inspired by the clarity and effectiveness of their installation. There was joy and pride in what the kids could see and articulate so simply: separating families and killing people in the street isn’t right.

Until one young woman decided it was the right moment to challenge the two parents sitting in the background. Had we taken them to this protest or that protest?

It wasn’t the question, or the three that followed in fast succession. It was the energy.

We immediately felt attacked, judged, and suspected. It threw us off. In a clearer state of mind, I would have offered table space for information about upcoming marches, as we had already done with the hotline organizers. In a clearer state of mind, I might have turned the question around and asked what she was doing that day for the cause.

But the toxic energy knocked our dials out of alignment. We were caught off guard, momentarily unable to think.

You know something is off. You don’t know why. And it makes clarity and effective action harder to access.

The lesson isn’t that there are toxic people on all sides of every conflict. That’s obvious. The lesson is that toxic people interfere with our ability to function at our best.

The only answer I’ve found is to trust my dials and step away from the energy as soon as possible.

Almost everyone I interact with is not like this. Most people are easy to flow with, easy to relate to, and easy to understand. That’s why it’s so noticeable when the rhythm breaks.

It’s not my job to know why.

It’s my job to turn on a dime - and believe the energy exchange.

* Berkeley girls activate