Now What
It all seems bleak, but…
The most meaningful pursuits have no finish line. No final victory, just the ebb and flow of progress. To navigate such a pursuit requires a mindset of agency, one that leaves no room for lamenting the way things are and is only focused on bending them to how you think they should be. A mindset that forces you to stay grounded about success and failure, because neither is permanent. These pursuits can be liberating; by accepting there is no idealized end, they allow you to become more practical about making progress. Having a finish line that will never arrive frees you to be honest to yourself about the validity of your ideas. There is no dogma, no sacred cows — just the work, and if you’re lucky, more of it.
My mother was the first person I knew who had what it took to take on such a pursuit. As Muslims in India we were a minority; and like all minorities throughout the world, we were always in the pursuit of acceptance by the society we lived in. An acceptance she told me would never fully come. But that shouldn’t stop us from striving for it. “This is not something to complain about. It just is — because that is how people are,” she would say. “But, because they are people, their minds can be changed. It is on you to figure out how. And if you ever do manage to change them, don’t forget — they can always change right back.”
This last election should encourage those unhappy with its result to view it as a moment in a never-ending pursuit and adapt my mother’s mindset. Because for all the tears being spilled about a changing electorate, what should be remembered is the ability for large swaths of people to change. Sure, they did not change in the direction you wanted them to, but they showed they can be influenced. The onus is now on you to sway them to your side. Anger, while tempting, won’t help here. Eighty odd million people do not care about character or felonies. Accept it and move forward. Spouting facts also won’t help; telling someone who is complaining about the price of groceries that they live in the best economy in the world is simply ineffective. People voted on their perceptions rather than actuality. That’s just how people are.
So, once you’ve done the post-mortems, aired frustrations about your party’s leadership, and shed the illusion that being “anti” a stance is enough, it’s time to remember that you’re dealing with people — and that you have the ability to change their minds. Once you put aside the hopelessness and enormity of the task and treat it as an endless pursuit with no final win, you can reclaim your agency and do the work needed, work that should be different from the type of work that got you to this point. This mindset and approach will help you thrive whenever you take on something ambitious or daunting — whether it’s gaining acceptance, starting a business, getting healthy, or bringing about change. There is nothing more freeing than a battle that can never truly be won but will continue to ebb and flow because of the effectiveness of your work.
My mother would often remind me: simply demanding that others recognize our humanity was less effective than showing them that we understood theirs. I’ve always been in awe of her perspective — the practicality, agency, and complete absence of self-pity with which she approached the situation. For her, this mindset — that things can change, that the work never ends, that there are no final victories — was the only way to navigate an endless pursuit. It was the only way to bend reality toward what she believed it should be.
So if you feel despondent, as many do after the events of last week, remember: the effort you put in now is no different from what you’d need to put in if things had gone your way. Because, this is just a moment in a pursuit that will never end. What could be more liberating than that.
