Chosen Obligation

Caring Each Other Through

Last October, I visited my mother in Minneapolis. One of our conversations was on the topic of obligation. My mother didn't want others to feel obligated to visit or show up for her, though she welcomed them wanting to do it. I shared my perspective on chosen obligation; I value feeling obligated to others regardless of whether I want to do something. It relates to my core value of placing relationships first and showing up.

Soon after I returned home, my mother found out she needed to have surgery that would require several months of care and support in her necessities of daily living. As a result, she experienced vulnerability in a way she never had before.

When we view obligation as a constraint or a burden, it is antithetical to freely choosing. But obligation need not be counter to freedom. Autonomy means that we are free to choose difficult things, including showing up for our relationships as one of the most important aspects of a creative and fulfilling life.

Obligations are not perceived as freely chosen when we experience them as thrust upon us or guilt-inducing should we say no. Only when we are free to choose does obligation offer us a chance to deepen our relationships.

A sense of chosen obligation must also extend toward ourselves. Sometimes, we cannot show up for someone in a way that we would otherwise like or the way they envision most needing.

Over 50 years ago, Wendell Berry in The Hidden Wound wrote about a core source of our collective social, emotional, and political illness – that we wish to rise above the sweat and bother of taking care of ourselves, each other, and the country. Twenty years later, in the 1980s, he wrote an afterward for a later addition and reiterated his thesis.

He wrote, "As our private economies become more abstract, the mutual, free help and pleasures of family and community life will be supplanted by a kind of displaced or placeless citizenship and by commerce with impersonal and self-interested suppliers."

We are all experiencing the ill effects of the disintegration of our communities. For Berry, the great enemy of true freedom is political alignment with wealth; this alliance destroys the commonwealth – the natural wealth of local economies, neighborhoods, and communities. Since the commonwealth is the foundation of democracy, wealth that unduly influences our politics destroys our democracy.

We have cut ourselves off from what Berry calls necessary work by devaluing it. Much of this work is care work – the effort it takes to care for ourselves and others. Connecting to and caring for the land that provides for us is a considerable component of necessary work. Devaluing necessary work segregates us from those doing this work who receive inadequate compensation. The desire to no longer do this work also separates us from ourselves and leaves us worrying about who will care for us when we are in need.

In 1989, Berry warned that the media deals with the symptoms of community disintegration in a piecemeal fashion – e.g., addiction, depression, violence, racism, and lack of faith in our institutions – which keeps them newsworthy. Over three decades later, the national conversation continues to amp up the divisiveness rather than doing the hard work of reflecting on how we can collectively better care for each other. The embeddedness of wealth and politics is greater, and we elevate economic value above all else and reduce everything to its market value.

Berry suggests that things are unfavorable but not hopeless. To turn around, he says we must reject prevailing assumptions about how change works and focus on cultivating and strengthening our communities. We cannot continue this trajectory; it will ultimately fail. But only if we are willing to place the highest value on all forms of care and cultivate community life can we shape what comes next.

In a recent Substack essay, Courtney Martin explores Hannah Arendt's idea of the frailty of the human condition as the starting point of strengthening communities and, by extension, our democracy. Martin reflects upon how Lyndsey Stonebridge, Arendt's recent biographer, urges us to consider a politics that supports the commons and caring for each other.

What if we assumed periodic dependence for all of us as our natural state rather than extreme self-reliance and continuous interdependence? If we did this, what would our politics look like?

Martin asks: “What if we picked our political leaders not based on who could raise the most money?” (A similar question I've asked is, “What if we view mega success at fundraising as antithetical to a politician's ability to succeed at making policy that benefits all?”)

Martin ended her essay with a call to empowerment as we move toward an election that fills us with dread.

Let's stop strengthening democracy this year. Let's start weakening delusions about the human condition, which will then help us reimagine democracy for a country, a people, as we really are – young and old and everything in between, and temporarily well and often sick, and sometimes able bodied and sometimes not, sometimes broken hearted and sometimes full of joy and optimism and tangled in relationships that hold us up through it all.

These lines are counterintuitive, even seemingly irrational, because they run counter to the strategies hammered at us during increasingly costly election cycles. “Do something! Don't sleepwalk! Donate, donate, donate!” Yet, my body tells me Martin's words are deeply truthful.

I've been grappling with how to support this critical upcoming national election. I give money but with decreasing enthusiasm because I know I'm participating in an unhealthy dynamic. Elections elevate money as the most critical resource, more important than relationships. This narrative is eroding our communities and disempowering us. Politicians are trapped in this transactional, destructive game regardless of their core values and aspirations. They remain beholden to wealth more than the health of communities.

Give money to election cycles or don't. Show up and do what you believe is necessary to do. But let's strengthen democracy in the best and perhaps fundamentally only way we can, by chosen obligation, caring for each other through it all. We can find purpose and beauty in countless, quiet acts of showing up and loving each other with all our frailties and vulnerabilities.

Many of us can relate to my mother's fear of vulnerability of not being able to care for herself. No matter our unique challenges to allowing vulnerability, society's illness of devaluing care diminishes our capacity to make room for healthy dependence and interdependence.

After my mother's surgery, my two sisters and I took turns going to her house to help, and a dear friend remarkably joined in and showed up for her. Yet, my mother also needed help from an agency to meet her daily care needs. She had paid into a long-term care policy for years to receive this help. The agency's approach and the quality of the care were woefully inadequate by any measure, adding tremendous stress to my mother's recovery. I've heard many such stories from other people trying to find care for their loved ones.

We hear murmurings and complaints that people don't want to work these days. It's time to recognize that we have arrived here after decades of devaluing care. Recognizing the underlying cause of the problem is the starting point of turning things around. With an understanding of the underlying source of the systemic illness, we can choose the path to healing our psyches, communities, and country.

Spending two weeks away from my home to help my mother after surgery, of course, disrupted my engagement with other things that matter to me. Because I was free to choose to care for her, perhaps because it was a sacrifice, it made my decision more meaningful.

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