Keep moving

28 Mar 2025 by Mandy Brown

IN THE PRACTICE of listening to people talk about their work, I collect a lot of stories. It’s one of the ways I see my work, as both a reader and a gatherer, a sort of editor of an unfolding, ongoing history and future anthology of work. Being in this position affords me a unique perspective when events cut across industries and geographies and impact disparate peoples in different but connected ways. Over the past few months, I’ve observed a number of patterns emerging in the moves and countermoves that workers are making in response to the direct, violent, and unconstitutional attacks on human rights, life-sustaining infrastructure, and work itself. Here, I offer them not as guidelines or directives, but as entryways, starting points, notions or suggestions. If you’re feeling stuck or uncertain, perhaps one or more of these notes will give you a stone to upturn or the energy to shift your feet a little, to move, even slowly and cautiously, towards the work that makes all our lives better.

Organize

The most reliable antidote to despair is action. The always-on, always moving news cycle and shock doctrine scale of destruction is designed to make you feel hopeless and feeble, as if there’s nothing to do but numb yourself to the terror. This, like so much else we’re confronted with today, is a lie. There is so much that every one of us can do, and so much to be gained by doing it—not the least of which is a sense of your own agency, the connection to the deep well of power that each of us has in our bones and blood.

Right now, workers are organizing in their workplaces and in their communities. Much of that organization takes the form of unions, but there are many other patterns to draw from, too: setting up a backchannel to talk to your peers away from company surveillance; coordinating care and support for trans and immigrant colleagues; leaking company plans to eviscerate diversity efforts and resegregate the workplace; refusing orders that are illegal, immoral, or both. Remember that organizing can be both about building up living systems and structures as well as stopping or slowing others from tearing those same systems down.

Organizing can also look like building alternative infrastructures, planting seeds for different ways of working together, modes that have more resilience against the capricious and violent desires of billionaire investors and their crackpot minions: think here of mutual aid groups and worker cooperatives, of decentralized communities and leaderful assemblies. A crisis is as much an opportunity to imagine—and move towards—new futures as it is a moment to grieve the futures we’ve lost.

Gather strength

Strength comes in many different forms: not only physical strength but spiritual and communal, the strength of materials but also the strength of friendship and kinship. This could look like bringing more attention and practice to whatever your mind and body need to be strong—not in the sense of controlling or asserting power over others, but in the sense of being sturdy, steady, able to carry some weight. Maybe that means strengthening muscles and bones, or maybe it means strengthening your ability to sit with fear and uncertainty without giving in to despair. Perhaps also it’s the strength to practice hope, to trust your own inner wisdom in the face of so much outward confusion.

Strength can also mean gathering resources, and under capitalism, few resources are as useful as money. Now is a good time to increase your savings, if you can; to consider your options if lean times are either upon you or likely to be up ahead; to invest what money you do have in people and organizations that are working towards collective futures. Don’t presume that this kind of strengthening is only something you can do on your own, however; a small group of people pooling their resources are much more able to care for each other than any individual, alone. Real wealth is always measured in people.

Kinwork

Now is also the time to kinwork—to reach out to people you know, people whose company you enjoy, whether you’re old friends or new, whether you met on the street or at work or at your local coffee house. As I’ve said before, this isn’t about making a series of transactions, or amassing favors; it’s about making connections, about building and sustaining relationships which grow more strength and agency for you both.

It’s especially important in times of crisis to do the work of making kin: isolation breeds its own kind of discouragement, the sense that nothing can be done. To contemplate lifting a huge boulder on your own is overwhelming; but do it with a dozen other people and the task becomes easy, even joyful. We need that ease and joy, now as ever.

Remember also that as work changes—by your own choices or others—your work friendships need not come to an end. Making kinworking a part of your work means that even when faced with a violent rupture, you don’t walk away with empty hands but with a full heart, a bundle of group DMs, and the collective wisdom of your people.

Experiment

If you’ve been working for any length of time, in any kind of work, you’ve likely become quite good at planning. A good plan is a glorious thing and it’s a great skill to be able to make one. But uncertain times resist planning. Without being able to predict what might happen, creating a plan is like making a map in a thick and unrelenting fog—you’re either making it up or else stuck waiting for the fog to clear. But where planning leaves us short, experimentation and play can open up space. Instead of making a plan, think of one small step you can take and then see what happens. Talk to someone about an idea that’s been on your mind but you haven’t given voice to yet; ask a question in a meeting when no one else is speaking up; publish that blog post you’ve been sitting on; reach out to someone for a referral on a job that looks exciting but seems out of reach; gather a group of colleagues together to talk about what’s happening and what you might do about it together; close your laptop and take a walk in the middle of the day and follow wherever your mind takes you. Then: see what happens. Notice what patch of ground or sky you can see from this new position, and take another step.

Lots of small experiments can add up quickly, the same way hundreds of steps can cover tons of ground. Maybe you can’t clear the fog away entirely—we live in strange times!—but neither must you sit around, stuck and morose, hoping for it to lift. Remember that there is no such thing as a failed experiment: every effort to try something is a lesson, whatever happens. Step lightly, but keep moving.

Make your art

Among the people I’ve witnessed working through crises in their work and lives, the one pattern that comes up over and over again is making art. Art brings us back to ourselves, helps us root in our own agency and creative power, makes space for the joy of craft and play, and reminds us of our purpose in the world. On dark days, it’s easy to think that there’s no room for art, because the work of survival is so demanding. But art doesn’t merely take time—it gives time and energy back. It renews our spirits and the spirits of everyone who sees or hears or experiences the art, who receives the art as it’s intended: as a gift.

I take an expansive definition of art here, including writing, painting, weaving, knitting; dancing, singing, performing on a stage or in the street; baking, rock climbing, throwing a rave, streaming a poetry reading, dropping flyers at the farmer’s market. Art is the creative power to make something, whether an object or a story or a brief but genuine smile. To make art is to change the world, to recall that the world is ever changing, that nothing is certain because so much is possible.