Z is for Zeal #AtoZChallenge
My 2025 A to Z Challenge theme is activism. I’ve been a Black Lives Matter activist for over a decade. I’m not an expert. I do have experience to share and I’m hoping to learn from your experiences, too. We’re all in this together.
In American society, emotions like zeal and enthusiasm and eagerness tend to have some negative connotations. They are naive or too intense for public display. We use those words to censor others and, worse, to censor ourselves.
I want to make the case, in my final post of the A to Z Challenge that we engage with zeal.
Here is the definition from the Merriam-Webster dictionary:
eagerness and ardent interest in pursuit of something : fervor
To sustain our activism, we’re going to want to find passion, courage, and zeal for the work.
Here are some ways that help me to cultivate zeal:
- Meetings give me ideas, energy, and community.
- Action begets action. Once a ball is rolling, my play is to simply chase it.
- Inspiration comes from my favorite thing — books! This month I was inspired by Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown and On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder.
- Daily attentiveness normalizes activism for me and gives me daily opportunity to seek delight and zeal.
- Monitoring my feelings and self-care helps me build a deeper foundation for my zeal.
I also love this quote from Gloria Steinem:
People, at my age, do ask me, “who am I passing the torch to?” And I always say, “First of all, I’m keeping my torch, thank you very much, and I’m using it to light other torches, because everybody needs a torch. That is a way better revolutionary image than one person with a torch.” ~Gloria Steinem, 25 April 2019, PBS Newshour
What helps you maintain courage and zeal for the work of building a better world?