Light a Small Lantern

Reproduced by kind permission of the artist, Hassan Massoudy.
Chinese Proverb. Hassan Massoudy on Instagram

In September of 2018, my husband had gotten back from working for six months in the Yukon Territory, very far removed from U.S. politics, natural disasters, hate crimes, mass shootings, and the growing sense of powerlessness among people who wished for something different.

He'd been home only a few days when he pulled me away from the hearing of our children and told me that a lot of my conversations since he’d been back included complaints without solutions, and he didn’t know how to make things better.

It felt like a gut-punch because I've always been a person who firmly believes that a complaint without a request or a solution is just a lot of negative energy being put into the universe. I've never had patience for it, and I rarely indulged in it because it was just so pointless and destructive.

But in 2018, two years into the first term of the current administration, my own sense of powerlessness in the face of all the negativity in the U.S. Government, the press, and in cities and towns across the country had grown a voice and a form which came out of my mouth in the shape of complaints.

When I looked at the things about which I'd been complaining, I’d felt helpless to affect any sort of change – those things were too big, and too far outside my reach. There were too many obstacles and people standing in the way for me to see a solution that I could impact in any meaningful way.

Fast-forward to 2025 and compound that feeling by 56,000 ICE detainees, by 1.6 million transgender Americans under siege, by 14 million predicted deaths from USAID cuts by 2030, and the helplessness is paralyzing.

Not long after that uncomfortable conversation with my husband, I spent several hours helping an author friend format her book, and in those few hours the complaints that felt too big had faded into background noise. I might not have been able to make a big difference, but I could make a small one, and somehow it was enough to propel me forward out of the inertia and depression that gave complaints my voice.

Making small differences sustained me through the rest of that presidential term, during those times when I couldn’t find the energy to speak up or show up and the strength to write had deserted me. Doing things for other people gave me hope through the COVID shutdown, the physical and mental health challenges of loved ones, and into this new, even more devastating political landscape. There have been moments since 2018 when I’ve indulged in a complaint, but they’re inevitably unproductive, usually damaging, and always leave me feeling worse than if I’d said nothing at all. Logically, I know that the time I put into volunteering, creating events, writing posts about things that matter to me, and helping my family and friends should be spent writing books or otherwise generating income, but I’ve also come to realize that the small differences I can make for other people are exactly the things I need to do to keep the complaints, the paralysis, and the despair at bay.

I’m up in Washington State, writing at a friend’s house while my bagpiper spends the week in British Columbia at a piping and drumming school, and my breaks from the computer are spent outside pulling weeds and picking berries for jam. I spent the first two hours of my workday today volunteering for the Pipe Band Association, I have some graphics to make for a competition I’m producing, and when I’m done writing this I’ll go walk the dog. These things are not on a measurable scale in the grand scheme of differences to make, and yet doing something for others every day can be as habit-forming as complaining can be, and far more rewarding. There's no power to be gained in complaints without solutions or requests, but the steady trickle of satisfaction that comes from doing things for other people can be enough to turn words of complaint into ideas of possibility.

This beautiful Islamic calligraphy piece by Hassan Massoudy says what I need to hear whenever the negativity in the world threatens my mood, my mindset, or my own creativity. "Instead of railing against the darkness, it's better to light a small lantern." We can all find small lanterns to light through acts of kindness, service, and community, and if enough of us light them, we will find our way forward through the darkness together.