What does success look like in this situation?

I wrote the first part of this post on the morning of Jan 24, 2026; I’ve marked the second part, written after ICE agents killed Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse in Minneapolis.

Last night we visited the monks, pilgrims on a Walk for Peace from Texas to the sprawling suburbs of Raleigh, carrying on through the winter storm to eventually get to Washington DC. They’d been the walking 20 miles a day since October. We’d gone at the last minute, picking up kids from school and finding where the monks would be on the interactive map.

One estimate said 700 people showed up that night to a high school where local officials gave them gifts and thanked them for blessing their town Apex - The Peak of Good Living!

As the mayor said the city’s slogan, I clenched my jaw, writhing inside. I’d been looking at a photo from Minneapolis all day, a protestor thrown to the ground, ICE agents on his back spraying chemicals directly into his eyes.

When one the venerable monks finally took hold of the microphone, he opened with a prayer for peace and compassion, and asked us to ask for forgiveness for hurting others and ourselves. He said the people we often hurt the most is our parents. Then ourselves. Then others. We had to forgive them, forgive ourselves for the harm we all inflict. And that we should not make enemies. Naming and creating enemies is what causes conflict, violence, anger.

I know this is the truth, but like many truths I understand, I struggle to always put them into practice. My phone is a toxic and powerful tool that I do not know how to protect myself from. Anger arises from inaction; it is a substitute for action, not the fuel. And hate really is drinking poison and hoping your enemy will die.

As I was writing the first half of this post, ICE agents murdered Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse in Minneapolis who was helping a woman off the ground. My proclamation to stay off social media evaporated. I watched the video from every angle.

With a storm building inside me I took a gun into our woods to shoot squirrels, certain the time had come to work on rifle maintenance, marksmanship and eating from the forest.

While I was out there, I visited the Marian shrine we’d created in the fork of giant black oak on the edge of our property and saw the tree weeping. A stream of fermented, bacterial sap had frozen on the trunk, flowing below the statue. It was another sign, since noticing the huge flush of jack-o-lantern glowing mushrooms last fall, that this ancient oak was sick, dying. And I felt the weeping shrine echoing the suffering the world, but I also felt it weeping for suffering which I too would inflict.

I gave in to the pull of outrage on behalf of people brutalized and mocked for compassion and courage. And I wanted the people closest to me who were complicit in this moment to suffer.

I imagined myself Gandalf driving Worm-Tongue’s voice from Theoden’s ear, the lines from Louise Glück’s poem “Clear Morning” ringing in my ears.

I am prepared now to force
clarity upon you.

But you learn (if you’ve gone to enough therapy), that you are only responsible for your own actions and emotions.

Requiring someone else to act or think differently than they do, as a condition of your own happiness, is to create your own suffering.

None of this is to say do nothing. But I’m circling back to a phrase that’s been popping up for me all month, as I try to help my family and colleagues and friends struggling with actions, decisions, priorities that are trapped inside too limited a frame of what choices we actually have. “Let’s zoom out and ask ourselves: What does success look like in this scenario?”

So many of us are reactively struggling against cruelty and unfairness, as if overcoming that which we “don’t want” is the actual goal.

Framing your action as resisting an enemy is framing your struggle on your perceived enemy’s terms. That’s not to say we don’t set boundaries and plans.

For me at least, now is the time to widen my perspective and put energy into answering the question: What does success look like in this situation? I will be imagining and building towards that.