Author: gracesmuggler

One year ago, after the inauguration, we began to experience an onslaught of executive orders and threats — making sweeping changes, canceling grants, and negating existing rules. It was remarkably overwhelming. Steve Bannon later said the strategy was deliberate, naming it “flooding the zone.”

One year later, it feels like the zone is being flooded again, but this time on the world stage. It’s not one major crisis or a single impending set of threats. It’s Venezuela. It’s Minnesota. It’s Iran. It’s Greenland. The sheer volume makes it hard to know where to look or how to respond.

In the midst of this, I want to share something Eli McCann recently offered. As a gifted humorist and storyteller, he’s a TikToker with a large following. He shared something his Mom used to tell him growing up.

When so many waves of chaos, impending threats, and massive change hit at once, it is completely understandable to feel panicked or despairing. When those feelings show up, we can care for them within ourselves and alongside others. But ultimately, as Eli McCann shared, his Mom would tell him that staying in panic or despair isn’t productive.

Instead, she encouraged him to ask himself a question: What is something I can do today, in my own sphere of influence, that will make the world better? What is something I can actually do?

It’s a simple question. And I also think it’s remarkably helpful. It’s easy to look in all directions and either feel overwhelmed or believe we’re powerless. But we are not powerless.

What can each of us do, right now, in our own sphere of influence, to care well for what’s unfolding — and to help build collective change? Sometimes that question is where steadiness begins.

—Renee Roederer

–Photos by Renee Roederer

Check them out.

We’ve had snow this season, but yesterday was the first day things were actually canceled. It was a snow day for schools, and when that happens in the district where my work office is located, we’re work from home. I really enjoyed that yesterday.

When I was growing up, snow days unfolded differently. We had to wait and watch the news to find out whether our school district would be closed. You’d tune in and stare at a scrolling list of district names, holding your breath, hoping that yours would finally appear.

In the region where I grew up, the same song always played during that scrolling list: Chuck Mangione’s Bellavia. Every single time.

To this day, whenever I hear that song — and let’s be honest, now I usually have to look it up because it’s not exactly playing on the news anymore — I’m instantly filled with childhood joy. There’s something about it that takes me right back to that feeling of anticipation, possibility, and elation.

Last night, I put it on and danced around my house.

Some memories don’t fade. They just wait patiently for the right moment — like the first snow day.

—Renee Roederer

Once a month, I have the great privilege of co-leading a program called Mindfulness Moments with Andrea Thomas, MA, LLP, a psychologist at Henry Ford Comprehensive Epilepsy Center. What we do together is very simple, yet also surprisingly expansive.

We invite people to arrive on a Zoom screen, something that has become totally routine. And for twenty minutes, Andrea leads us through a mindfulness reflection. We close our eyes, listen, and imagine. Then for ten minutes, I guide us in conversation. Just 30 minutes, once a month.

But when people become present and allow imagination to open, what emerges is often deeply moving.

At our most recent gathering, Andrea invited us to imagine a mountain. It could be one we’ve seen or visited before, or one entirely of our own making.

During the reflection, she asked us to notice everything that changes across a year. Animals move and scatter. Plants grow. Snow falls, then melts. Rocks break off. Fog comes in so thick that sometimes you wouldn’t even know a mountain was there at all.

And yet, the mountain remains.
Even when it can’t be seen, it is present.

It is changing all the time, and yet it is also steady, essentially unmoving, save for the tiniest, most imperceptible shifts of tectonic plates over time.

There are moments when people are like that, too.

Sometimes we are hidden.
Sometimes we are visible.
The core of ourselves is solid and unchanging.
And paradoxically, we are also always changing.

When I lived in Pasadena, California, I had a beautiful view of the San Gabriel Mountains. Every so often, fog would settle in so completely that if you didn’t already know the mountains were there, you’d have no idea of their presence. Then the fog would lift, and there they were again. Most of the time, they appeared gray-brown. Occasionally, they were capped with snow.

Unmistakably the same mountains.
Always revealing something new.

I find myself returning to that image.

I invite us to consider the parts of ourselves that are hidden, and the parts that are visible. I invite us to connect with the parts that remain steady, and the ways we are being shaped and changed right now.

And I want to leave you with a short poem, written anonymously by a Jewish person during World War II. It was found in the cellar of a concentration camp. It reads:

I believe in the sun, even when it is not shining.
I believe in love, even when I can’t feel it.
I believe in God, even when He is silent.

Perhaps one of these lines will resonate with us.

Maybe among the parts of us that are hidden or present,
or the parts that are unchanging and yet constantly changing.

—Renee Roederer

Here’s an invitation to share that kind word — the one you’ve been sitting on, thinking about, but hesitating to send, or forgetting.

Months ago, all of my coworkers signed a card. We each wrote a short sentence or phrase of encouragement and signed our names. It probably took ten seconds for each one of us.

But it meant the world to the recipient. I happen to know he has carried that card with him for months. It’s become a tangible reminder that we are with him — standing behind him, offering encouragement, and reminding him of his own abundant strength.

Simple words. Small actions. Ordinary forms of recognition.

These acts of kindness go much further than we often realize.

—Renee Roederer

Over the weekend, I had a long drive, and I spent some of that time listening to music I haven’t heard in many years. I’m always amazed by what happens once a song starts. Even if it’s been more than a decade, if that song was part of our lives, the lyrics come rushing back, and we can sing every word.

As someone who used to sing a lot of choral music in different languages, this amazes me every time. Five minutes before a piece begins, I can barely remember anything about it. And then it starts — and suddenly I can sing it word by word, even in languages I don’t actually know. The memory lives somewhere deeper than conscious recall.

Music has a unique way of creating this experience. It bypasses effort. It unlocks something stored in the body.

And it makes me wonder about other things, too.

If we were willing to pause and stay present with our bodies and our senses, what else might we remember? What else might suddenly become present again?

Would we feel connected to people we’ve loved — some who died many years ago, and others we still know and see today? Would we remember what it was like to hear someone say our name in just that particular way? Would the small traits and quirks of people we love come rushing back — things we couldn’t have summoned on purpose?

Or perhaps the remembering would be quieter. A sensation might bring us back to a moment we treasured. Experiencing solitude. Playing as a child. Becoming ourselves without realizing that’s what we were doing.

Music reminds me that so much remains. It’s just waiting for the right kind of attention.

What else might we unlock if we were willing to be present?

—Renee Roederer

While driving in the car, I heard a psychology professor and researcher say a sentence that stopped me short. On the TED Radio Hour, Dr. Jamil Zaki said, “Cynicism is a sort of dark safety.”

He went on to explain:

“When the world is uncertain, we can feel completely exposed — deeply unsafe. So how do you recover a sense of control in a world you fundamentally can’t control? One way is to prejudge it and to prejudge everyone in it. A cynic, by deciding they can’t trust anybody and that people are generally rotten, may not live in a very bright or happy world — but they live in one they understand. They feel as though they can predict the future. They feel as though they understand the people around them, and that gives them some semblance of control over a chaotic life.”

When we believe
that most people can’t be trusted,
that many—if not most—outcomes will disappoint us, or
that not much can truly or meaningfully change,

there is a kind of “certainty” in that.

And navigating uncertainty is hard.

Another psychologist, Dr. Bruce Perry, puts it plainly: “We prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.” [1]

So we stay in familiar, harmful rhythms. We excuse others’ behavior, or our own. We remain where we are, even when we could risk uncertainty and build substantial, life-giving change for ourselves and our communities.

Cynicism may offer dark safety. But it’s also a trap.

—Renee Roederer

[1] Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook—What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us about Loss, Love, and Healing (New York: Basic Books, 2006).

–Photos by Renee Roederer

In 2022, I had a chance to perform in a choir alongside the National Arab Orchestra and the renowned Abeer Nehme, whose vocals are absolutely stunning. I highly recommend having a listen to this performance with her.