“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
– e.e. cummings
That quote has meant a lot to me for a long time and in ways both figurative and literal, it travels with me always. For me, 2020 has made this battle more important than ever, while simultaneously making fighting it that much more challenging. In fact, it feels a bit of a microcosm of this entire year – a serious of deepening fractures and profound contradictions. So far, 2020 has asked us to navigate how to:
- Come together as a nation to combat a deadly pandemic, with a leader more divisive than perhaps any of his predecessors.
- Turn out in droves against police brutality and system racism, despite being told to stay home for public health reasons.
- Be full time parents, educators, and employees from the same physical space, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
- Maintain productivity (and perhaps learn a new skill) while our brains attempt to process an unfamiliar, unrelenting, and unforgiving trauma.
The list goes on. One of the ways in which these seemingly irreconcilable tensions has laid me low is the all-consuming desire to do something useful while also confronting the crushing despondency that comes from thinking anything I do – everything I do – is so inadequate as to be pointless.
Carnot is a personal manifestation of fighting the hardest battle – to be nobody but yourself – and thus to only be as effective as you yourself can be. That won’t look like everyone else’s battle or anyone else’s path. But the most important thing is to never stop fighting – or as we say around here, Always Be Crusading. Because if not us, then who?
Welcome to Carnot.