Parts 2&3–ARJS Book Club by Michelle Obama Facilitated by-Maja Sandstrom

The AntiRacist.Jubilee.Symposia Book Club

”The Light We Carry,” by Michelle Obama

• January 22, 2023 – Forward &PART 1
• February 19, 2023 – PART 2&3

The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times

The focus of our reading will cover how we show up for ourselves in times of strife. The ways we cope with change and isolation. And the importance of finding ways to ground ourselves in uncertain times. 

We have limited time today and we’d like everyone to have the chance to verbally participate if they wish to. 

TLWC BOOK CLUB GUIDELINES:

• Please be open-minded and approach each response with empathy and compassion
• Please feel free to ask questions / respond to our prompts throughout the discussion in the chat when you’re not verbally speaking to the group at large
• If you have already verbally shared your response to a question, please allow for another member of the group to answer a subsequent question
• Please share as extensively and as candidly as you can, being mindful of time and ensuring we allow for group response to your addition to the discussion
• Please RAISE YOUR HAND (either on camera or using the Zoom function) to nominate yourself to answer the question/prompt requested. 

Key Themes/Takeaways:

1. Ways To stay calm and hopeful in the present challenging world
2. How to build &  establish honest relationships
3. How to locate like minds to support and encourage you 
4. Identify Tools to overcome feelings of helplessness and uncertainty
5. Develop the progressive attitude of helping others
6. Identify tools to overcome obstacles and adapt to changes in the world
7. Ways of conquering self-imposed limitations

Please read and consider the DISCUSSION QUESTIONS in the Chapter descriptions below. Please come prepared to provide your insight and feedback regarding the chapters as we make our way through this work of self-discovery and reflection in The Light We Carry. 

_________________________________________

Forward:

Michelle Obama talks about her family dynamic, highlighting her family’s relationship with her father, as well as his subsequent diagnosis and battle with Multiple Sclerosis. 

Most of us have a life changing event or recognition early in life of our caretaker’s fallibility. Coming to a realization we are or will soon no longer be children who will be required to care for ourselves, and potentially become the caretakers for those who take care of us in the future. Michelle notes feelings of insecurity watching her father fall, wondering about his safety, about her family’s safety, about the bigger implications of her father’s disease on their very way of life. 

Discussion Prompt: Do you have a similar experience to Michelle or a pivotal moment you can recall recognizing your own caretaker’s mortality or fragility? How has that affected your framework for security in life? Do you often feel secure or insecure? In what ways do you seek and/or achieve the feeling of security? 

PART ONE

Chapter 1: The Power of Small

• Discussing the early months of the pandemic, a period during which many of us were nervously watching the news and reading the dire headlines, Mrs. Obama writes: “Everything felt big. Everything felt consequential. Everything was big. Everything was consequential.” In this fraught space, Mrs. Obama discovered how the simple act of knitting helped to calm her anxious mind and counter the overwhelm. “It buckled my churning brain into the back seat and allowed my hands to drive the car for a while.” She calls this “the power of small.”
  • Have you ever experienced the “power of small” in your own life? 
  • What are some activities you do or strategies you use to keep anxiety at bay? What have you discovered about yourself when undertaking these small acts?

• Mrs. Obama talks about hearing from young people over the years about their ambitious dreams, including a young woman who wrote her a letter stating: “I want to take over like Beyoncé, but bigger.” However, the young woman also acknowledged that sometimes her mental health gets in the way of her drive to achieve that dream and make her family and ancestors proud. “Your mind is constantly and imperfectly working the levers, trying to keep you steady. . . . It may throw up distress signals when it senses a problem— if you’re trying to move too fast or working in a way that’s unsustainable,” writes Mrs. Obama. “It’s okay to prioritize your wellness, to make a habit of rest and repair.” Have you ever found that your mental health was impacted while you were working towards a goal, even one you were passionate about achieving?
  • How do you prioritize rest so that you can sustain your energy for working toward your goals, both big and small?

Chapter 2: Decoding Fear

• Mrs. Obama unravels the ways that abstract and common fears—such as embarrassment, rejection, or facing new situations—have the power to influence our choices if we don’t learn to decode them. “Jeopardy is woven into the experience of being human,” she writes. But she argues that the fears arising in response to disorder and differentness are often worth taking on in direct ways to understand and overcome them.
  • When in your life have you encountered something new or intimidating that elicited fear? How did you work through that fear? Did you have a different perspective on the source of your fear after you faced it?

• “Doubt comes from within,” writes Mrs. Obama. “Your fearful mind is almost always trying to seize the steering wheel and change your course. Its whole function is to rehearse catastrophe, scare you out of opportunity, and throw rocks at your dreams.” Mrs. Obama now accepts the presence of this fearful mind, addressing its pattern of negativity and self-criticism with familiarity to diminish its influence over her thoughts: “Oh, hello. It’s you again. Thanks for showing up. For making me so alert. But I see you. You’re no monster to me.”
  • What has your fearful mind said to you? What are other names for this phenomenon? Have you found ways to counter the interior critique, calm the inner chatter? How would you address your own fearful mind?

Chapter 3: Starting Kind

• Mrs. Obama reveals the daily routine of her friend, Ron—every morning, he greets himself with a simple and affectionate greeting in the bathroom mirror: “Heeey, Buddy!” Mrs. Obama acknowledges that for a lot of people, including herself, the mirror can be a scary place, and that women especially are “consistently held to higher standards when it comes to grooming and style, requiring more elaborate, more expensive, and more time-consuming preparation before feeling comfortable heading to work or even just stepping out into a new day.” The real power of starting kind, she says, comes from “redirecting any impulse to judge or self-denigrate . . . [and beginning] instead with a simple message of compassion and approval.”
  • How can you give yourself a “deliberately kind start” in the morning like Ron does?

Chapter 4: Am I  Seen?

• Reflect on Mrs. Obama’s statement: “It’s hard to dream about what’s not visible” and how it relates to many of our most contentious debates, from the existence of systemic racism to the shadow of slavery to the reality of LGBTQ+ lives. As she notes: “We need to stay aware of whose stories are being told and whose are being erased. This is a battle over who matters, about who gets to be seen.”
  • What is something you now know about our history that you weren’t taught about in school? Why do you think people want to cherry-pick what is taught and what is ignored, and what might they achieve by doing so?
• Finish this sentence: “When I am seen, I feel________”

_________________________________________

PART TWO

Chapter 5: My Kitchen Table

• Mrs. Obama defines her “Kitchen Table” as “the people beyond my family who I trust, delight in, and rely on most—and for whom I would do anything.”
  • Do you have your own “Kitchen Table”, and if so, who does it include? What do you bring out in each other?

Chapter 6: Partnering Well

• How has a spouse, significant other, friend, or loved one added light to your world? Have your thoughts on what a fulfilling and supportive relationship looks like changed over time and with experience?

Chapter 7: Meet My Mom

• On parenting, Mrs. Obama says that she and her brother, Craig, were encouraged to speak their minds at the dinner table, allowed to horse around on the couch, and expected to make their own beds in the morning. Many of these basic expectations were a complete contrast to how Mrs. Obama’s own mother, Marian, was raised.
  • What were the rules in your house growing up? Do you have a different perspective on any of those rules now than you did as a child? 
  • If you’re a parent, what are your basic rules around the house and how did you come by those rules?

_________________________________________

PART THREE

Chapter 8: The Whole of Us

• Mrs. Obama writes a lot about the idea of home, which means different things to different people. For some, home is a specific person, a warm hug, or a place to put your feet up. For others, home is fraught, a painful place or time to which you never want to return. “And that is okay. There’s power in knowing where you don’t want to go. And then there’s also power in discovering where you want to head next.
  • How do we build places where gladness lives—for ourselves and for others, and most especially for children—and to which we will always want to return?” Describe your idea of home.

Chapter 9: The Armor We Wear

• Sometimes the very things that we try to hide from others, or that we imagine to be vulnerabilities or weaknesses, can actually be powerful points of connection and motivating factors that drive us to overcome. “When someone chooses to lift the curtain on a perceived imperfection in her story, on a circumstance or condition that traditionally might be considered to be a weakness, what she’s often actually revealing is the source code for her steadiness and strength.”
  • Think about anything you may have instinctively withheld about yourself with certain people or in certain situations in your life, or still do choose to withhold. How might you reframe these things as part of the source code of your strength?

Chapter 10: Going High

• Mrs. Obama also acknowledges that “the work of visibility is difficult, and it’s distributed unevenly. There’s nothing fair about it, in fact. I happen to be well-acquainted with the burdens of representation and the double standards for excellence that steepen the hills so many of us are trying to climb.”
  • Think about a time when you stepped forward when you could have stepped back. How did it make you feel? 
  • How might you continue to step forward, whether to advocate for yourself or in support of others who face greater burdens in doing so, within your own community, school, or workplace?

 
___________________end_____________________

https://www.youtube.com/@antiracistconversations4293