Revisited: What if everybody’s job is to do repair?

I’ve been thinking about a post that I wrote earlier this year: What if everybody’s job is to do repair?

It’s on my mind after several meetings with folks in my network and running across some new readings. It all points toward the lesson of be present and do stuff, but also, I now think, to the twin actions of creation and resistance.

We live in broken times. So much new damage being layered on top of still unrepaired historical damage. In the environmental equity work being done in Evanston, you can literally see this unrepaired historical damage on the map; average life expectancy in historically redlined neighborhoods is 13 years lower than wealthy, white neighborhoods. Later this month, the local fair-housing organization Open Communities will hold its Walk the Redline event, making the concept of Evanston’s history of discriminatory housing practices and its current, on-going impact on the neighborhoods more visceral. You can see the lack of open space and trees, hear the noise, breathe in the air affected by heavy traffic and the waste transfer station (where city garbage is consolidated before going to landfill).

That’s just one historical slice among many. Then we look around and see the current damage being done to our public health system. To our immigrant neighbors. Our educational institutions. To all the work done to address climate change to date. We live in fear that our schools are no longer safe havens for our kids and grandkids. You get the point.

It’s easy – and normal – to freak out.

But we can also find paths toward progress by recognizing the resources that community connections bring. Importantly, the paths encompass both creation and resistance. In my case I am working with people who are actively creating solutions to address climate change and environmental justice issues at the local level. Yet they are also the same people who I know will be there, and with whom I can join, to resist the next authoritarian overreach of the Trump administration.

Lately I have met with former colleagues, former students and new friends who are all present in their communities and doing stuff. Some small things. Some bigger efforts. But doing stuff. And all ready to be part of the resistance. You really start to feel the collective.

“What if everyone’s job is to do repair?” comes from Jessica Norwood, founder and CEO of Runway. Runway is a Black and Brown women-led financial innovation firm focusing on building Black community wealth.

The question is an insight she had as the result of a recurring dream. She was in heaven, in a queue to get a job from “middle management angel.” Her job, her purpose, is to do repair work to fix historical damage. But that work is personally exhausting. Then she realizes that everyone else in queue gets the same job.

“Now imagine,” she said in recounting the dream story “that everybody’s job is to do repair.” It means I might be able to do something for you, now. But if not, someone else is on the job for you. And you are on the job for someone else. The work can be something small; a kind word at the right moment can repair. The point is: Repair needs are met by the collective.

“That’s that abundance that I’m talking about, that community and collective work really brings,” Norwood says.

A similar theme came up in a recent post by social psychologist Adam Mastroianni, who writes the Experimental History Substack.

Mastroianni tries to unpack how and why people just tap out in the face of everything seemingly going to shit. One explanation is that we feel we are in a lose-lose situation: Embarrassing if we try to solve the problem and fail, but also embarrassing not to try. One unproductive strategy that we humans have learned can help us deal with this tension is called self-handicapping. You just declare failure inevitable. That way, you avoid blame for trying and failing and you avoid blame for not trying. Mastroianni points to this as a shooting-your-own-foot strategy.

The point that foot-shooters miss is: We really don’t know what is possible or solvable until things are actually solved.

“Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position,” writes Rebecca Solnit in Hope in the Dark. “Both excuse themselves from acting. [Hope is] the belief that what we do matters, even though how and why it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.”

Mastroianni echoes that point. “So when folks seem hell bent on giving up, I wanna know: why are they holding on so tightly their hopelessness? What does it do for them? If the future is so uncertain, if no one can justifiably say whether or not we’re gonna make it, why not pick the belief that gets you out of bed in the morning, rather than the one that keeps you there? Why do we have to make it seem like being on the right side of history is such a bummer?”

The choice we should make is to be present and do stuff.

“When you’re paralyzed by the number of problems,” writes Mastroianni, “the only way out is to pick one. What kind of world would you like to live in, how do we get there from here, and what can you do—however small it may be—to move us in that direction? We’re not looking for saints or superheroes, just people who give a hoot. In the billion-person bucket brigade that’s trying to put out the fires, all you need to do is find a way to pass the pail from the person on your left to the person on your right.”

It’s what happens when we realize we all have the same jobs: Doing repair work. And resistance.

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The photographs which accompany these posts are taken by me, and show different settings and views of Evanston (where I live). It is a visual reminder that this is the most important setting for belonging and contributing to community: our neighborhoods, our cities.