How to Live with Beauty and Strength

I had an interesting discussion with my globally nomadic teacher friends. We talked about tenderness and strength. We discussed how they aren’t mutually exclusive, even though we might initially think so, but rather complimentary values which walk hand in hand. There’s a difference between strong and hard. There’s a line between resilient and apathetic. There’s an ocean between courage and foolishness.

The balance between tenderness and strength is a difficult one for the global nomad and even more so for the global nomad peacebuilder. You set your heart on justice. You love justice. You can mark a path towards institutionalizing justice and ending things like gender-based violence, one-party politics, child prostitution, gentrification, or forced land evictions. I'm hardly the only person working in Southeast Asia who hates injustice. But at the end of the day, is this a sustainable way to live?

There are moments when I consciously acknowledge that I can’t spend every day hating the Lexus’ four-wheel drives which exemplify indulgence wealth in Cambodia. I know myself—I know other global nomads well —and we will fizzle out drowning in our righteous anger over the injustices. Instead, we have to find small ways to restore our souls. We have to find beauty and find ways to remind ourselves that we cannot invest and die on every hill of injustice we encounter. We often forget and must often rediscover that peace begins in our own hearts. And can a heart filled with hate truly transform anyone or anything? Will that transformation even be with it?

And so, at the end of the day, I need my friends who give my solace and encourage me to be myself, I need my journal, I need my art projects and my occasionally complex baking projects, I need to dance to hip-hop when no one is looking, I need my cooking shows, and I need to leave Phnom Penh once in a while and see trees. These are the beauties that compliment my frustrations, the reminders that even while injustice is a dominant byproduct of evil, we are not its slave.

Somewhere in the balance of tenderness and strength, confrontation and boundary-pushing, justice and mercy, truth and grace…that’s where we all live.