Antidote

I have spent many months hearing much more about the election than I might have wanted--working for a news outlet will do that to you. I have had moments of "too much information" and moments of "please, just turn down the volume," but I have trudged through, doing my job, engaging in conversations, wondering some days how we actually got to where we did. And now, in these last days, I am worried about outcomes, but I am glad this phase will soon be over.

Today, I spent a few hours not editing politics packages, not checking my email and Facebook for the latest campaign news, not obsessing about tensions and ads and outcomes. For those few hours, I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. A LOT of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Together with a group of people young and old, I helped generate over 1400 bagged meals for hungry New Yorkers. It will, in the long run, matter to these New Yorkers who is elected on Tuesday. But today, what matters is that they will have a meal they might not otherwise have enjoyed. And while it always feels good to play a part in doing good, today, it felt particularly good, because in a week full of events I won't really be able to affect, I was able to affect people I will never know, on a level as basic as two slices of bread.

How we create change, both for ourselves and for the world, is not always in the ways we might expect. For me, it was being elbow deep in peanut butter for a few hours and seeing the results of my labor and of the collaboration around me. And there's no antidote to feeling that you can't make change as powerful as seeing that you can.