When the Pendulum Swings Back: Holding Rage on the Edge of What’s Next
Some days it feels like we’re standing in the middle of a long storm, waiting for the wind to shift. The question that keeps coming up in our spaces is this:
What are the signals that we might be approaching the other side of this moment?
We often discuss it, not as wishful thinking, but as a kind of readiness. How do we prepare ourselves, and each other, for the dignity and calm that might be possible when this heaviness starts to ease? How do we make sure that when the pendulum swings back, we’re not too worn down to reach for what’s ours?
Currently, many of us are carrying a great deal of rage. Rage at systems that starve people and call it austerity. Rage at the cruelty that keeps families waiting months for help that never comes. Rage that feels both righteous and exhausting. We hold it because we must, but we also know rage is not a resting place. It’s a flare. Bright, short, and demanding to be followed by action.
Someone in the circle said, “We have to get to the other side. The pendulum has to swing the other way.” That truth sits heavy and hopeful at the same time.
To imagine that swing, we can look backward. History gives us patterns: the slow rise and collapse of harmful systems, the way communities learn to feed each other (literally) when institutions fail. Cooperatives remind us that survival doesn’t have to mean isolation. Even small, local models—a shared childcare collective, a tool library, a neighborhood kitchen—are subtle signs that the future is still taking shape beneath our feet.
We’ve seen these answers before: community, mutual aid, reciprocity. The question now is how to strengthen those networks without waiting for another crisis to force our hand.
Young people are showing us that there is no middle ground left to stand on. The reality they face doesn’t give them the luxury of pretending otherwise. And still, they create. They protest, they organize, they remix old strategies for this new terrain. The challenge for the rest of us is to follow without smothering their fire.
We also keep returning to a hard truth. There will be violence. Systems do not surrender power quietly. Preparing for the other side means building protection, not panic. Knowing where we will go, who will hold us, and how we will keep each other resourced. It also means learning to make money with no strings attached, creating channels of abundance that aren’t dependent on approval or control.
And as always, we look to Black women for guidance, those who have led us through the fire again and again. But this time, we ask ourselves how to prepare without expecting them to carry it all. Leadership doesn’t have to mean bearing the weight alone.
Before any of these shifts, we’ll have to tell the truth about where we live. About what we’ve normalized. About how close to the edge we really are. Only from that honesty can we begin to build what comes next together.
In December, our CHOIR Book Club will read "Parable of the Sower" by Octavia Butler, a text that doesn’t promise safety but teaches adaptation, resilience, and belief in what we can plant, even as the world burns. For those who want to explore what’s alive or fading in their own work, the EcoCycle Planning exercise offers a way to identify what needs to be born, what needs to rest, and what we might need to release.
And for a dose of creative hope, we’re drawing inspiration from the artist Soudio, whose work reminds us that beauty and rebellion often share the same heartbeat.
We’re standing on the edge of what’s next. Still holding rage. Still dreaming of calm. Still learning how to move as one when the pendulum swings back.
