When you feel helpless to stop the suffering you see, when you feel helpless to change the decisions made by heads of state, it is easy to feel you are also helpless altogether. 

You are not. You have some ability to exert change over your own life, to change the arc of your own story—especially if you feel called in a certain direction.

Another way to describe current events is history-in-progress. History is made by people. You too are a person who can shape the tide of history. 

I think that our minds often snag on one thought, which makes us stumble: 

Our own small actions seem too small compared to the huge events we are facing. 

It’s true that the amount of action and influence available to us in a day is limited. It can be demoralizing if we have a whole week or month of facing those limits. 

But the hidden roots of any monumental moment is the ordinary routine of our everyday lives. 

This is easy for me to see as a writer—even as a teen who knew she wanted to be a writer. Like my peers, I studied US Literature and US History side-by-side. Right now, we mostly know Thomas Paine’s Common Sense as a book Angelica Schuyler references in Hamilton, but I read excerpts of it in class, cited as a text which sparked the birth of the United States. 

So, I learned in class that words can shape history, but I was already a writer, practicing the novels I would write someday. 

Writing itself is incredibly uneventful. You are gathering words into sentences, trying to convey meaning, and sometimes obsessing over the order of your paragraphs. From the outside, it often just looks like a person surrounded by paper, holding a pen, looking somewhere between distracted and concerned. 

That much hasn’t changed since Thomas Paine’s days and our own. Maybe Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote some of his lyrics on his phone, but I bet the distracted-concerned look was the same across centuries. I bet they both spent countless hours practicing their craft, absorbing the works of their peers, rearranging words to convey the meaning they were reaching for. 

Ordinary actions on ordinary days, but as I said before, the hidden roots of any monumental moment is the ordinary routine of our usual lives.

Maybe you too are a writer. Maybe you are not, but I encourage all of us to anchor into the ordinariness of our lives—to value it as the potential for something we can’t yet see. 

After all, it was also routine for Rosa Parks to take the bus, but well before the day she refused to move, I’m sure she spent decades modeling grace under pressure in a thousand ordinary ways. More recently, Tarana Burke was listening and speaking with courage and compassion, saying “Me Too” for years before most people were paying attention. 

We don’t know what our monumental moment will be. We only know what is ordinary to us, something that may be much more impactful later down the line.

So again, we are not helpless. We are already leaning into potent change somewhere in our lives. 

It will feel ordinary to you—until suddenly, it’s not. 

You are looking at my ordinary: words I scribbled on post-its this morning, transferred to a computer this afternoon, and then posted someplace where my words could reach your screen. 

So, what’s your ordinary? 

What’s the ordinary change you’ve been showing up to, again and again and again, not knowing where it might lead? 

Other Hidden Roots of this post: I rewatched Hamilton this week. You’ll likely hear echoes of Miranda’s lyrics in here. It entertains me deeply.