The Thing About Fighting

Most fights are stupid – that’s the starting point right there – and all of ’em get messy.

This is not about politics. It’s about ethics.

This week, while sticking up for a friend, I failed to rise to the occasion and show compassion for someone else; a person, who probably needed kindness more than my friend needed my grit. There weren’t any winners at the end of it. No one was the wiser.

Trying as I have been to understand not only my worth as a person, a writer, this, that, the spectrum and the rainbow, but also my responsibility toward San Francisco and my neighborhood and its people, and my people, it is a process. The end game is not one without challenges.

Nobody’s perfect. Faltering and falling are part of the road, but you gotta own your shit. Ya gotta own it. Because, sometimes, ego gets in the way, and the true enemy gets ya and pulls ya away from the Light. I’m not religious (so this isn’t that, either), but there is a light above my head, and this is a notion to which I subscribe and which I try every day to follow. Follow the Light. Like an Inca.

It got a little dark on me, on us, and we faltered. The clarity came to me under the sun, once I put some distance between me and the darkness.

Happens to the best of us. All this fighting that is so commonplace now – the relentlessness of most it and the effect of it on the lot of us – does not have to, cannot keep us from our work as torchbearers for others.

Charity begins at home, though. And so, I gotta remember: Be the change.

Be the change. Switch it up. Turn the beat around, always.

And be the change.