the universal quilt that we are weaving together: early explorations into effective altruism
I ate a red bean donut for breakfast. It was covered in sugar, and the old lady who sold it to me put a muscat candy in my bag. When I left the shop, a schoolgirl was kneeling by her bicycle, crying. I patted her back while adults did the hard work of walking her somewhere safe.
I wonder if I’m too adherent to rules -- don’t eat before noon, stay away from carbs, trust others to intervene better than I can. Rules help me feel like things are in order, like I’m concretely taking steps to be kinder, lovelier, more. But both the crunch of the sugar and the huddled support of five women at 8:30 AM felt like small gifts, demonstrations of humanity’s effort to provide comfort and care in whatever tongues we can -- bound by the wordless recognition that all of us deserve joy.
I have been thinking about joy lately, and how to make more of it. I have been reading about famine and disaster, children dying of preventable diseases, and the whole of human civilization collapsing as a result of our own doing. I have looked at the numbers and felt nothing and I have looked at the numbers and felt like the time to act is now, that we are collectively at the precipice of either unspeakable loss or glory for millennia to come. I have been thinking about my role in all of it, what my morals and privilege obligate me to contribute to the first-aid pack that humanity is scrambling to throw together. I have been wringing my hands and scratching my head and feeling my chest constrict as I try to organize the unending influx of information into a comprehensible life philosophy. I have been inventing new rules, practically and stupidly and because it seems like the only logical thing left to do. And I have been trying to put it into writing, failing, and feeling distraught that I can’t.
I want to do good and I want to inspire you to do good as well. I want to read facts and maximize efficiency and know that x, y, and z will make me a good person. But I also want to keep the simplicity alive -- this zest for Being that I’ve only recently taken residence in -- and continue prioritizing little splendors like the sunshine and warm beverages and holding hands with someone who is sweet to me. I want to see and honor you, I want to fix at least one of the world’s problems, and I want to be a normal person who contains their ambitions within the surmountable pocket of individual life. I want to respond to evidence with my mind and I want to respect and follow my heart’s whims. I figure that there must be a way to do all of it, to live in the contradiction of favoring myself over others despite wholeheartedly believing in our equivalency, our essential sameness and right to pleasurable life.
I am not there yet. I have no answers and no smart questions, only a fear of being paralyzed by a lack of certainty. So here, have this snapshot of my understanding at this particular moment. This is my evolving practice of effective altruism, to the extent that I currently believe in it.
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“On your way to work, you pass a small pond. On hot days, children sometimes play in the pond, which is only about knee-deep. The weather's cool today, though, and the hour is early, so you are surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond. As you get closer, you see that it is a very young child, just a toddler, who is flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond. You look for the parents or babysitter, but there is no one else around. The child is unable to keep his head above the water for more than a few seconds at a time. If you don't wade in and pull him out, he seems likely to drown. Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago, and get your suit wet and muddy. By the time you hand the child over to someone responsible for him, and change your clothes, you'll be late for work. What should you do?”
Above is Peter Singer’s “Shallow Pond” example, a philosophical thought exercise that has stayed with me since I first heard it a year and a half ago. If you, like most people, have the beautiful quality of empathy, you likely believe that the right thing to do would be to rescue the child, even if it means ruining your shoes or missing a few hours of work. In fact, you might consider it a moral obligation to take action. A child’s life is worth infinitely more than a small inconvenience, right?
Peter goes on to make the argument that the situation above isn’t just hypothetical. In fact, we are living it every day. According to the World Health Organization’s latest estimates from 2019, approximately 5.2 million children under the age of five die from preventable causes each year, children who could be saved with relatively little money and relatively little burden on those of us living in wealthy countries. If we would save the child drowning in the pond, why aren’t we saving children dying of treatable illnesses? (If you want concrete answers, they are found in Peter’s book The Life You Can Save.)
Along with several other big thinkers, Peter’s ideas have informed the practice of Effective Altruism (EA), a global movement centered around a simple question: how can we do the most good? Effective altruists strive to answer that question through a combination of evidence and careful analysis. They approach philanthropy as a science, knowing that thoughtful and intentional decision-making has the potential for enormous good, with the best choices being thousands of times better than just-okay ones. Practitioners of EA take action in many ways, the most popular being donating to highly effective charities and intentionally entering high-impact careers.
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been deep-diving into EA with the intensity of an old high-school classmate trying to coerce you into a pyramid scheme, except slightly more justifiable because it’s motivated by a desire to live in accordance with my morals. During this crossroads period of my life, I’ve had the space and time to reflect on how I’ve been operating. In short, it’s been less than thoughtful. I’d like to remedy that.
As I consider what matters to me, I keep landing on the word “life.” My own, yes, but also yours, and also all life everywhere (and in every time, perhaps). I’ve been running down a shrouded path, vigorously and optimistically, hoping that luck and faith will lead me somewhere beautiful. I still believe that they will. But I also understand that I don’t have to charge forth cluelessly, that I can use my small brain to learn about and apply what others’ big brains have researched about optimizing positive impact. Beyond merely intending to do good (or at least not doing harm), I can actively identify opportunities to do the most good possible with the time and effort that I’m willing to give. I find that to be an intriguing pursuit, one with the potential to occupy and titillate me for a long time to come.
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Admittedly, I entered the Effective Altruism space with guilt, so that’s where I’m going to start the story.
Like most young people with even mild social awareness (especially those who have forayed into the corporate world only to bolt right back out), I harbor extreme distaste for capitalism and a half-facetious, half-earnest desire to turn my back on material living and pursue more intense varietals of asceticism. However, in some twisted sense, I understand that the opportunity to do so -- to flee from the aspects of life that disgust or disturb me -- is a bit of a cop-out, especially when I am so well-equipped to play the game. The logical part of me has the wisdom and detachment to understand that capitalism is a system in which I, by way of being an American-born, English-speaking, college-educated woman, have the positionality to decrease suffering in significant ways. I can take on small, trivial inconveniences (more time at my desk, less time to frolic and write inanities online and eat chocolates in the bath) for the potential to do real, measurable good around the globe and into the future. GiveWell, the leading independent charity evaluator and prominent EA organization, estimates that it costs somewhere between $3000-$5000 USD to save a life through donations to malaria-prevention aid. With a median US salary, I could save a life yearly. Really, when phrased like that, how can I believe that I am entitled to such selfishness to act otherwise?
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Based on my reading of a single page of Cliffs Notes, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky appears to be a verbose, confusing, and extremely Russian piece of literature. I mention it here not because I’ve read it (I haven’t), but because it poses some juicy philosophical questions. Here’s a fun one: "Imagine you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature . . . to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?" In other words, would you torture a child to death in exchange for utopia for the rest of humanity?
This is where I might lose you. I would torture the child.
Further, if I were a mother, I would offer my child to be tortured (and probably kill myself soon after due to the unfathomable trauma, but that’s an extraneous tidbit). And if I were the child, I would 100% offer my life. That would probably be the ideal situation, as it’s much better to choose martyrdom than to be volunteered for it. In my opinion, it’s a pretty awesome deal: one measly death for the promise of endless bliss for the rest of all time.
Let’s lower the stakes and play the trolley problem. Would you pull the lever, killing one person to save five? I would. Would you pull the lever, killing one person to save two? I would. Would you pull the lever, killing your life partner to save two strangers? I believe it’d be the right thing to do, so I would aspire to find the strength to. And I would certainly want my partner to do the same to me. After all, what is love if not morality in action? What is love if not Abraham binding Isaac to the altar?
I’m not saying this for shock value, or to convince you that my thinking is correct. In fact, if everyone thought like this and also acted on it, we’d have a decidedly horrible world where cruelty is acceptable and we sacrifice each other’s well-being like chess pieces. To offer a different perspective, the question asker in The Brothers Karamazov states that he would not torture the child and posits that even the most serene and long-lasting harmony is unacceptable if founded upon innocent suffering. At least I think he says something like that; again, I only read the Cliffs Notes.
In any case, my reaction to these thought experiments offers insight into a personal truth about myself; I am a utilitarian. I believe that it is morally correct to maximize overall utility (i.e. happiness, well-being) even at significant personal cost. I think that I should be willing to go through unbelievable hardship -- the loss of life, even -- if the end result is better for mankind.
If all that is true, then there is an extreme mismatch between my beliefs and my actions. Which begs the question: why am I not sacrificing more?
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A contemporary example of this line of thinking comes in the form of Bo Burnham’s “Art is Dead” from his 2013 comedy special entitled what. In the song, Bo questions his deservedness to be an entertainer and sings, “I must be psychotic / I must be demented / to think that I’m worthy of all this attention / all of this money you worked really hard for…Because I wanted my name in lights / When I could have fed a family of four for forty f*cking fortnights.” I relate, except that instead of an artist, I am a self-important young person.
When I decided to leave my start-up job that ticked all the normative boxes of “success” but was less than thrilling for me, I thought it was very cool and praise-worthy of me to turn my back on wealth and chase personal fulfillment, a fun refutation of the Asian-American desire to placate immigrant expectations or die trying, or a Gen Z version of the “wanderlust” narrative that travel influencers have been peddling for the past decade. I thought my move was something to be applauded, that I had woken to a greater sense of personhood or dignity by detaching my self-esteem from income, by escaping wage-cuckery or groupthink or sheeple-mindedness or the simple inability to think up bigger, free-er, more reckless dreams.
It was a good decision. I would do it again, and I would advocate for you to do the same. But it was a selfish decision. I prioritized my comfort over others’ survival. I’m undecided about what level of blame and reckoning I should take on for making such a choice.
Most people would probably agree that being a teacher doesn’t make me a bad person, just as most people don’t hate Bo Burnham for making a living as a comedian. I don’t think that I, or you, or anyone should take on an undue amount of suffering, wherever you draw that line for yourself. But I do think we have a moral obligation to factor social good into our decisions.
According to the Fred Hollows Foundation, the typical cataract surgery costs $50 USD. The straightforward operation takes 20 minutes and reverses vision loss that would ultimately lead to blindness. With the approximate $40,000 pay cut I took this past year, I could have saved 800 people from blindness. To repeat, I could have saved 800 people from blindness. I have worked harder to pay for lesser joys -- to gallivant around metropolitans, to eat $30 organic salads, to order Ubers when I could just walk instead. How deranged am I to think that my fun time abroad is worth the opportunity cost of 800 people remaining blind?
Some EA members call this type of price comparison “Dead Child Currency,” wherein one measures the price of things in relation to the impact they could have instead made through aid. For example, the Miffy earrings I want could buy 12 insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent malaria, a small Telfar bag is equivalent to deworming 150 children suffering from parasitic infections, and the new sacai / ACRONYM dress (SAC-D6012) is the same price as saving a child’s life through Helen Keller International’s Vitamin-A supplement program in East and West Africa. These numbers are based on actual cost-effectiveness calculations from GiveWell, by the way.
This is an illuminating way to think, but it is also miserable and reductionary, so I’ll spare myself from following it further lest I burst into tears the next time I’m deciding between the cheapest or second-cheapest brand of dish soap.
After the initial shock and shame dissipate, realization comes in two waves. One: the global disparity gap is unbelievably wide. Two: as a result, everyday people -- that’s you and me -- are capable of generating similarly unbelievable impact.
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Some people validly criticize the EA movement as overly callous, simplistic, or reliant on rational action. In many ways, I agree. So here, let me frame it within my salient passions: minimalism and racial justice.
I’m laughing at myself for having become the type of person who would say this earnestly, but minimalism is probably the closest thing I have to religion in my life. I get spiritual pleasure from knowing that I have the resources and discernment to welcome what feels right and to release the rest. Minimalism reminds me that I have everything that I need and in fact, plenty leftover. It asks me to feel the weight of that privilege, to pause before acquiring excess, and to be thoughtful about where to allocate my resources.
I know that I have so much, while so many don’t have enough. As a result, it only makes sense that I should give some of it away. That’s where EA comes in and provides a framework for how to do so in ways that will result in the most good possible. Easy peasy!
Where I feel tension is determining how much of myself I should give to this -- not just in terms of money, but in terms of my lifestyle and labor.
At the moment, my life feels satisfying and I can imagine replicating and adapting this satisfaction for many years into the future. My wants have lessened, and my contentment has grown. But what would happen if I expanded the net of my responsibility, tangled up your needs in mine? How much harder would I work if I cared for you as I care for myself?
When minimalism’s sweetheart, the ever-lovely Marie Kondo, asks “does it spark joy?” she is commenting on the potential that objects have to improve our lives. The question is beautiful, succinct, and makes for wonderfully ruthless decluttering. However, when it comes to assessing general life activities, I think that “does it have utility?” is a better question. Utility, unlike joy, recognizes that certain unpleasant things still deserve space in our lives, especially when they are means to a more beneficial end. These days, I’m pondering the utility of earning, trying to deduce how much effort I would give for the potential to do x amount of good. Is it selfish to contain my ambitions within the parameters of my own well-being? Is it wrong to be selfish? When will I know that I am doing enough?
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If you know me from a past life, you might associate me with a commitment to racial justice. I’m less loud and righteous about it these days, but my core belief in the sanctity of life and the common respect, dignity, and comfort that we are all entitled to remain strong.
A common reaction to any sort of justice initiative is “It’s not my fault, so why should I care?” When I was involved in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) work and still had the patience and goodwill to engage combative folks, that was my least favorite argument for non-action. When you pass the child drowning in the pond, you don’t say, “well, I didn’t push the child in, so why should I do anything about it?”
Within EA, the concept of “impartiality” is huge. In this context, it means “promoting well-being without regard to who in particular has a given amount of well-being, their race, gender, nationality, and so forth.” Basically, all lives have equal value, and we shouldn’t weigh them differently when deciding who deserves our attention. I mostly agree with this concept, at least for practical reasons, though my gut feeling is to prioritize people who are suffering the most or have been suffering the longest. Our world is stratified, and we shouldn’t ignore the fact that suffering is stratified too. It just so happens that the most cost-effective people and animals to focus on are usually the ones in the worst conditions, so there isn’t too much difference in the actions that these two approaches impel, though the thought patterns themselves are foundationally different.
What I do vehemently agree with is that we all have a tremendous stake in building a society that is just, and that we will either arrive there with our arms linked or not at all.
I’m reminded of the famous Lilla Watson quote: “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” I think that our liberations are very much bound up with each other, the kinky bastards that they are.
From an EA perspective, existential risks such as climate change and bioterrorism necessitate action as a united human front. And from an emotional, soul-touching perspective, I present the poem In Lak’ech by Luis Valdez, which draws upon Mayan tradition and is inseparable from the fight for ethnic studies in the US:
“Tú eres mi otro yo.
You are my other me.
Si te hago daño a ti,
If I do harm to you,
Me hago daño a mi mismo.
I do harm to myself.
Si te amo y respeto,
If I love and respect you,
Me amo y respeto yo.
I love and respect myself.”
When I first heard this poem recited, I had such a visceral cry that I was 30 minutes late to my first-ever research lab meeting. That’s how much I feel it, how much I believe that you are my other me. I believe it for all the academic and scientific and statistical reasons that demonstrate the interconnectedness of our species, but I also believe it in ways that cannot be measured, only felt.
Language eludes me, but I’ll try my best anyway: We are all God’s children. The apple tree makes apples and the Earth makes humans. We are part of the world, which makes us of the world and in the world and the world itself -- just as the wing of a bird is bird too.
Our essential sameness is what impels me to act impartially, to care deeply about people who are not my blood or my immediate community. It’s why we save the child from the pond even though it is not our own, why we fall in love with people who we once knew as strangers, why I feel moved to help people around the world who I will never meet or know by name, but who are nonetheless my equal.
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Let’s recap. I am in a unique position to do inordinate amounts of good. I believe it is morally imperative to make decisions that maximize utility, even if they require personal sacrifice. I have the capacity to give and the desire to help whomever I can with it.
So, what am I going to do? How am I going to best contribute to the world? Three things.
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1. I am choosing a career with EA in mind.
An EA organization called 80,000 Hours, named after the approximate amount of time you will spend working, rightly asserts that your job is the biggest ethical decision of your life. As they put it, “From adulthood, you’ll spend almost half your waking hours on your career -- more than the time you’ll spend eating, on hobbies, and watching Netflix put together. So unless you happen to be the heir to a large estate, that time is the biggest resource you have to help others.”
Throughout this blog, I’ve indirectly explained “earning to give,” or deliberately pursuing a high-earning career for the purpose of donating a significant portion of income. Think crypto bros, investors, and software engineers using their talents to make boatloads, then giving a lot of it away. Being employed in America (or any wealthy country) would enable me to donate much more than I currently can, and doing so is certainly on my mind. However, I don’t believe that I have the skills to be an exceptionally high earner. Rather, my skill set is more aligned with working directly for a cause, whether that’s an EA organization, a non-profit or NGO, or any company with a strong social mission.
Thus far, I’ve been making life decisions by throwing darts and seeing what sticks, except my darts are unwarranted exclamations thrust upon my poor parents, who escaped wars and crossed oceans so that I can approach my career trajectory with the level of care one might give to choosing a Netflix show. Identities I’ve tried on lately: “I’m going to be cabin crew for Hawaiian Airlines!” “I’d love to be a surrogate!” “Would you be mad if I became a baker?” I’m starting to realize that constructing a future based on the amount of social support that any one of my half-baked ideas receives is adventurous at best and disrespectful at worst. If my career is my biggest opportunity to have a positive impact on the world, I want to be thoughtful about it.
In my journal under the headline “Potential Jobs,” I literally wrote “some office thing”. Clearly, the details are nebulous, but my intention is definitely there. I’m taking the 80,000 Hours career planning course to more concretely define what I plan to do after teaching.
I am reframing how to approach my career. It’s not just a way to serve my own desires; it’s a way to serve others. I haven’t completely abandoned my fantasy of being a flight attendant (or an au pair or pastry chef…), but I am willing to make concessions if it means having a more meaningful impact on the world.
2. I am donating 5% of my income in 2022.
After doing all this research, making the decision to donate doesn’t feel revelatory. It feels obvious. (And it feels like it could come across as virtue-signaling, so fingers crossed that it doesn’t).
For earners making $40,000-$80,000 USD, The Life You Can Save recommends giving 1% of yearly income. Giving What We Can, another prolific EA organization, promotes taking a lifetime pledge to give 10% of income on a regular basis over the course of your lifetime.
I will make just about $24,000 after taxes this year, but I also enjoy the good fortune of a generation of financial stability before me, so 5% feels compatible with my ability. I really agonized over whether to make the jump to 10%, but I’m unfortunately not there yet. I hope you won’t judge me for it. Truly, I hope you show me up and apply social pressure to match you.
I have heard the argument that it is wiser to wait before donating, that I should invest everything and circle back at a later time. But I think that waiting could prove fatalistic because I don’t want to back out before it comes time to act. By starting now, I’m future-proofing against my own greed. I want to exercise my giving muscle while the dollar amount is small but the sacrifice is considerable so that I can push past selfishness and hesitancy when the dollar amount grows larger.
Donating is an obvious choice, but it’s not an easy one. I’ll be the first to admit that it is difficult to give away thousands of dollars. But giving, even in large amounts, is not a foreign concept to us. It is our natural reaction when we see people in need. I have friends who have written checks to friends unasked, who have fronted hospital bills without a second thought, who have rallied around GoFundMe's, who have donated a month’s rent to Twitch charity streams. We know how to care for the people we love. EA just asks us to love a little wider.
Choosing where to donate, ironically, was harder than choosing to donate. For a couple of years, I have been intrigued by the idea of sponsoring a child overseas, mostly spurred on by an uncharacteristic obsession with watching YouTube vlogs from large families with adopted children. I am years away from potentially fostering or adopting, though both are opportunities that I welcome into my life if and when I can guarantee a happy and healthy upbringing for any child. Sponsorship seemed like a natural first step down this path.
However, I ultimately decided against it for two main reasons. First, I was not able to find a secular organization that sponsors individual children. Personally, I am doubtful that a church can offer life-changing amounts of money without inspiring some level of obligation to hear its teachings. Second, it’s a terrible bargain from a cost-effectiveness perspective. At the end of the day, I shouldn’t donate because I want the emotional fulfillment of communicating with a specific child as they grow up. I should donate because I want my dollar to do the most good that it possibly can.
Based on that logic, my donation is split 50/50 between these two recipients:
GiveWell’s Maximum Impact Fund, which “uses [their] latest research to grant the funds to the recommended charity (or charities) where [they] believe they’ll do the most good.” Historically, grants have been given to the Against Malaria Foundation, New Incentives, Malaria Consortium, Helen Keller International, and Sightsavers. A highly scientific, data-driven approach to saving and improving lives -- it doesn’t get much more EA than this.
The Life You Can Save’s All Charities Fund, which splits the money equally between their 25 “best charities.” Cause areas include global health, climate change, women’s reproductive rights, economic opportunity, and many more. For people who care about a lot of different things, this is an exciting, catch-all, and effective fund addressing the world’s ills from multiple angles and timelines.
Here is my Giving What We Can pledge:
“I, Britney Budiman, recognize that I can use part of my income to do a significant amount of good.
Since I can live well enough on a smaller income, I pledge that from now until February 13, 2023, I shall give at least 5% of my income to whichever organizations can most effectively use it to improve the lives of others, now and in the years to come.
I make this pledge freely, openly, and sincerely.”
I give thanks for the privilege of helping to ameliorate suffering and honoring global life in tandem with my own.
3. I’m talking about it.
Truthfully, I am a bit wary of proclaiming my commitment to EA. Portions of it seem like a white boys’ club: a bunch of researchers waffling about expected value calculations, testing each others’ in-group knowledge, and defending hoarded wealth with the promise of charity. I’m worried about overpromising in very public ways, then holding myself to ever more impossible standards because it’s “the right thing to do.” But I’m willing to take a risk and engage anyway because failing in the direction of progress is better than standing still.
If I waited to act until I figured out the exact ratio of ethical decision-making, accountability, and “fuck it, we ball” that works for me, I would die before doing anything. My man Peter Singer, the guy who started this all, offers some sage advice: "I recommend that instead of worrying about how much you would have to do in order to live a fully ethical life, you do something that is significantly more than you have been doing so far. Then see how that feels. You may find it more rewarding than you imagined possible."
I’m challenging us both to try that, whether that’s through the framework of EA or otherwise. My hope is that over the course of this blog, you’ve encountered some new ideas (or received a refresher on some old ideas) that help inform what your particular style of Doing Good™ can be. If you think that any of the ideas have merit, please implement them, and then pass them on to a friend. Maybe that friend will tell another friend, and so on and so forth, and soon we’ll have set off a chain reaction of nice people pursuing the very best opportunities for doing good. Wouldn’t that be superb?
If you are interested in EA and don’t know where to start, take a look at this list of resources. I recommend starting with this TEDtalk and this introduction page. And of course, you can always reach out to me. I am only too eager to discuss.
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EA has inspired me to do a little bit of career planning, a little bit of donating, and a whole lot of rambling. I’m taking what works for me and exploring more advanced EA topics with a cautiously open mind, still undecided about whether I’m excited about measuring goodness in terms of quality-adjusted life years, assigning moral weight to the livelihood of fish, and listening to predictions about the most likely ways in which artificial intelligence and bioengineered viruses will kill us.
My strategy for doing good will still include all the things that it always has: relishing in the splendor of being, letting my life beget yours, calling upon Newton’s First Law to keep that vibrancy in motion, and savoring the kinship that comes as an accidental condition of being human.
I’m leaving science to the nerds and daydreaming about good in terms of my lived experience -- chocolate chips pattering into a mixing bowl, morning petrichor after much-needed rain, your hand on my thigh as we embark on the first beach trip of the summer.
Good is a body-feeling: an unraveling of the spine, a curving of the lips, the artistic medium of eye contact. It’s when you know me well enough to start calling me Brit, it’s when you touch me how I like to be touched, it’s when we’re brave enough to admit that we’re hurting. It’s awakening into our identities as healers, realizing that we’re experts in the medicine of food, movement, advice, presence.
Good is incidental. It’s what you and I are, even before we’ve planned and wished and repented for it. It’s waving your hand out of the passenger window while your friend speeds down the highway, it’s the sun rising over all the peaks that you will summit, it’s the universal quilt that we are weaving together -- each of our sections gently overlapping at the seams.