Softness and power
How crucial it is we hold to softness when the world appears to grow hard.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my baseline. The level I feel best settling at, my emotional resting state. For some people I imagine their baseline is an active one, a high frequency. They’re happiest or most themselves when propellent with forward momentum. I have shades of this. For others, their baseline is sedate. A low, operational thrum. I like to think I have shades of this too, but I’m less sure. And anyway, baselines change.
My baseline is soft. I know it for my actions when I’m in it. I reach out to friends to check in, a happy initiator; I choke up often and cry openly, often just reading or hearing something. This morning it was the first 50 seconds of this:
Then the middle, and then the end, when Westbrook holds up his fingernails to show the room and notes his twin daughters painted them the night before. “Girls,” he says brightly, directly to the camera at the back of the room, “Good job! We won!”
When I’m at this baseline I don’t overreact, I don’t take things personally. I feel physically settled, strong, and mentally relaxed. I’m able to process interactions, outside stimulus, and information at a psychic distance that feels like arm’s length. Not distant, I’m definitely engaged, but with enough space to see whatever’s coming at me for what it is. The whole shape instead of the shades it casts.
I’m curious and malleable (clearly, once again see the above video), but not shaped by my reactions. The world feels decidedly brighter, my lens for it widens. Observations that come from this baseline are nimble and expansive, seem to effortlessly put the point in question through a many-sided prism — whether originating from me or toward me.
I wouldn’t say baselines are automatic. I think they take a fair amount of work. Both in recognizing what yours is and how to best get there. There’s mental work and physical work, and determining the balance of that combination for yourself. It never really stays static.
I have felt a lot of that work this week. Felt my baseline slip from under my feet just as I'm settling onto (into?) it. In direct correlation, I’m sure, to the way that softness — as a quality, a virtue, an ask, an effort — has been targeted by the incoming American administration and its supporters, and the ripple effects felt round the world.
Softness is often described as passive, weak. To be soft is to be considered a pushover, a wimp, too sensitive. To yield at the barest pressure.
Softness, I think, is one of the most active and difficult characteristics a person can choose to maintain.
It’s tempting to pan immediately out and list everything in our contemporary social, political, economic and ecological climate in direct opposition to softness. There is no shortage, and some categories seem now to seek out softness in active pursuit instead of waiting to stymie it when they happen to meet it. But zero in. Think instead of all the small encounters and conflicts in a day that threaten softness. You’re cut off while driving, you’re nearly cut down by a car while walking or biking, you’re shoved, jostled, eyeballed with contempt. You miss a train, miss a deadline, you feel the day, once so open and promising, start to winnow and wilt. In this narrowing scope, like an animal backing into a tighter and tighter burrow, you become quicker to lash out, protecting the little space you sense is left.
Zero in even further and think of the phone you hold in your hands many times a day, or the laptop you use. All the news instantly there of cruelty, disaster, cruelty in disaster, fear mongering, hate, little vitriolic lightning bolts at your fingertips with every swipe and click capable of banishing softness at a glance.
Why hang onto yours if nobody else is? That seems to be the question posed. Though it’s beginning to feel like a dare.
Is there softness in basketball? It may be harder to glean and come in the game’s in-between moments, but yes. In a game played by people, softness is an absolute.
The magnetism of players resting on their team’s bench toward the game but really, their teammates within it. How players sitting on the bench will nudge shoulders, talk with their hands, hang their arms around each other, vie for high-fives and daps or sometimes just the trailing of fingers as someone comes from or heads out to the floor. The levity of the bench in collective reaction to a big play or shot is a sort of softness. A celebration of effort and skill, but also a pleasure taken in witness and understanding of a body in motion.
The ribbing between players on the floor between free-throws, especially if they’re former teammates. Even in how players will thread their arms around each other, bodies tensed for the rebound, the contact is usually never so rigid as to be dangerous — an awareness of the body behind them, chest heaving under a not-quite-locked elbow, this is softness even in meticulous defence.
Consider in nature what is most often correlated to softness. Animals other animals feed on, but definitely those that are smallest. Deer mice shed their tails in the clamping jaws of predators to escape (they can’t, like some lizards, grow them back); bats fly in tight swarms, similar to dense balls of bait fish in the ocean, for protection.
We think of flowers and plants as passive, inactive. There are estimated to be 400,000 species of plants on earth, 268,000 or so of them flowering, all established in and optimized for every climate nook and cranny. There are plants that move, plants that can withstand fire, plants that live for years without water, shrivelling to 3% of their once flush and healthy mass. There are plants that manipulate, plants that kill.
Aconitum, or wolfsbane, is a common North American wildflower that contains an alkaloid toxin capable of disabling nerves and causing cardiac arrest. It was used for hunting, hence its colloquial name, smeared on bullets in World War II, and promoted as a cure for Covid by the president of Kyrgyzstan (four people were hospitalized with acute toxicity). There’s a theory Alexander the Great had some slipped into his wine and died (there’s also a theory that he simply drank himself to death), and that Cleopatra murdered her younger brother and co-ruler with wolfsbane to advance her son to the throne alongside her.
When you go down the rabbit hole of poisonous plants and flowers, you begin to wonder how we got here at all. On every continent where humans foraged and evolved there are so many plants capable of killing us outright or making us vulnerable by robbing us of our crucial senses, that look and behave like the edible varieties they grow alongside. I wonder if the majority of people’s incuriosity or obliviousness of plants stems from some deep-rooted survival technique when we were the soft and vulnerable thing — to avoid eye contact, to ignore the thing that could kill you.
The softness of an emotional postgame, even a frustrated one where the athlete is unhappy. The off-scriptedness of confusion rising to the surface. On the other end a joyful or particularly funny postgame, when everyone in the room — athlete, media, team staff — are in on a joke or still captivated by the echoes of a big moment that happened on the floor.
Though they can sometimes feel the opposite, with their codes and language and league-mandated rules of timing, there’s a softness to locker rooms. Food laid out on fold-out tables, sometimes just balanced precariously on travelling storage bins that hold gear; bunches of bananas piled next to shoes the team’s equipment managers are gathering to put away and get on the busses. Athletes laid out on fold-out tables, getting treatments or just goofing around.
Steam, especially in cold cities in winter, trailing from the showers, bodies in different states of dress. Athletes who take great care in getting their outside clothes back on, who carefully slip on leather jackets, tilt hats just so, who fumble with the clasps on their chains as they put them back on.
You’re seeing people in the in-between states of going from one mode to another, professional to regular. It’s hard not to picture of yourself in these liminal states and where you’d be hard pressed to want to talk to another person, let alone let them watch you go from one to the other. It’s intimate, we each only have a handful of people, maybe just one, who we let know us like this. The balance of trust, if you really let yourself think about it, can be overwhelming. Trust, of course, another crucial component to softness.
What does it look like, to lead with softness?
It was so quickly framed as remarkable, what Mariann E. Budde did — asking Donald Trump to consider mercy in his administration’s leadership. The remarkability of it skewed every which way. Remarkable that she would ask that, or anything, of Trump, remarkable that she’d try. Remarkable she wouldn’t apologize to him. Remarkable that she showed courage that had been lacking from any public-facing figure to that point.
That it was considered remarkable to suggest empathy to anyone, let alone the sitting president, is the most remarkable part to me.
What isn’t remarkable was Trump’s reaction, or his family’s reaction in the seats behind him. Smirking and squirming, settling back into the mantle of assumptive power on their shoulders, these ignorant, vapid people playing at oligarchs. Watching them was like seeing a lost tourist in a country they were sure they grasped the basics of language for, only to find they’d studied the wrong guidebook. That “mercy” registered on their faces as a foreign concept, even an odious one, is all you need to know to understand where they’re coming from.
Budde said she’d been nervous to give her sermon. She had written it to highlight the elements of unity — dignity, honesty, humility — but in the hours leading up to the service felt compelled to add a fourth element, mercy. She said it was watching Trump’s inauguration address, and the initial responses to that address, that pushed her.
“I had a feeling that there were people watching what was happening and wondering, Was anyone going to say anything?” she told The New York Times, “Was anyone going to say anything about the turn the country’s taking?”
Examples we have of courage through softness are so quickly lionized and in effect, hardened. Political and religious peace activists are assigned a one dimensionality in their softness that becomes an operational code, a public persona they’re essentially hobbled by. To stray from that persona into the complexities that come in being a person will often be held as examples that undercut their work.
One of Nelson Mandela’s biographers wrote that he was “easily tempted by women”, another that he “at times exhibited a quick temper”. Carl Sagan was considered non-rigourous and fanciful by some of his scientific peers. Corita Kent, a personal favourite of mine, was an anti-war artist, a civil and women’s rights activist, she was also a devout religious sister of the Catholic Church.
With Budde, I think what was so striking was the immediacy of her actions. Not yet lionized or hardened by being called courageous or remarkable, listening to what she said and how she said it — even, measured — was powerful because it was so simple, so plainly human, so soft. And to watch Trump react with visible discomfort to that softness — Budde’s quiet delivery and her message — was to behold what softness can demand of power, especially desperate and fearful power.
My body roils when I think of the last minutes of Palestinian rights activists Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall’s lives, how their softness was met with the full bore of horror in what cruelty can do. But they were not passive. Their commitment to generosity and protection was a recommitment in their everyday actions. In the same vein many considered the quiet resistance of Nihon Hidankyo, the Japanese atomic bomb survivors' group, to be an exercise in futility. When the group won the Nobel Peace Prize this year they had to crowdfund to make sure their entire group could attend the ceremony.
In his acceptance speech the group’s co-founder, Terumi Tanaka, recalled becoming “almost devoid of emotion, somehow closing off my sense of humanity” as he lived within the destruction of Nagasaki after the U.S. dropped their second atomic bomb on Japan. Tanaka is 92, most of the remaining members of the group are over 80, the award wasn’t a culmination of their efforts — Tanaka was candid in his concern over the threat of nuclear weapons by Russia against Ukraine, and by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza — but a recognition. They brought to the ceremony the simple canvas banners the group has used in their sit-in protests for decades, and they went home and use the same banners still.
Softness isn’t passivity, or some divine lack of human impulse and vice — it’s a decision, and an inherently active one. To lean toward softness day after day in compassion, empathy, in rejection of forces that seek to limit and emotionally shrink us or cut us off from each other and the natural world. Occasionally, to reject in forceful ways. Protest can be peaceful, sometimes it absolutely cannot. Civil change, political change, and the human impulse toward change, these all work on different levels, different fronts that rarely align simultaneously.
It can feel overwhelming and exhausting to recognize that the nudges and pushes required to move forward on all these fronts don’t have an upper threshold, a requisite limit. We can’t just tick them off and move on. The forces pushing against them don’t require regression, though they’re happy to get it. They only require malaise and stagnation, a folding in and giving up. It’s enough sometimes to decide not to.
There’s a particularly heartbreaking softness that comes in the playoffs. The team that’s just won will seek out each player on the team that they’ve just eliminated, usually standing where they were when the buzzer sounded, breathing hard and dazed.
The winners will take the losers in their arms to console them. Patting backs, cradling heads with great care, speaking encouragement closely into ears over the din of an arena in the immediate throes of winning or losing.
Often, the biggest stars won’t find their own teammates until they’ve found and physically touched each athlete they were moments before locked into heated and tense opposition with.
When the Nuggets won their 2022-2023 title, Nikola Jokic did this for so long, searching for each and every player on the Heat — and so many of them hurt, the recognition of those injuries suddenly flooding in with their adrenalin fading — that by the time he made it back to his bench he had a thick layer of blue and yellow confetti resting on his shoulders, like snow. Like he’d been out in a storm for hours, making sure everybody he knew made it home.
A bit late to this. Really fantastic.
thank you katie 💙💙💙