This piece is part of Letters on Pragmatic Hope, an essay series in which Wesleyan professors and administrators reflect on a daunting question: How can students act with purpose and efficacy amid an increasingly authoritarian environment? The series aims to gather responses from a diverse group of Wesleyan faculty, offering a vision for how students can turn despair into pragmatism and action.
There will never be a scarcity of suffering. That is largely bad news, for obvious reasons. The silver lining, however, is that every moment presents an opportunity for us to tap into our sense of purpose and ease someone’s suffering somewhere. Sometimes to maximize our capacity to do good in society, we need to turn inward to burnish that sense of purpose. That may be counterintuitive, but I hope to offer some perspective on the benefits of calibrating one’s inner compass. If we are going out into the wider world from a hopeful, compassionate, grounded, and clear-headed frame of reference, it can only help our effectiveness.
It is not difficult to see why someone might look around and reasonably conclude that attempting to be of tangible help in the current world is futile. One reason for that is the sheer enormity of suffering—what our planet and so many of its inhabitants are enduring is literally overwhelming. Another reason, perhaps a more subtle one, is the way we are fed stories of heroism that are so dramatic that we might not look in the mirror and perceive that we have the capacity to be heroic or strong or well-resourced enough to make an adequate difference.
The reality, though, is that while none of us has the agency to make everything better, all of us have sufficient agency to make a real impact. For every video depicting a person singlehandedly doing something that results in profound change, there are many more instances of meaningful outcomes coming about under the radar and/or due to the cumulative effect of numerous less-dramatic actions. I will not claim that I have ever been heroic, but virtually everything impactful I have done in my life has occurred without cameras or public attention, and the same is true of virtually every heroic act I have personally witnessed. Sometimes these acts are dramatic, but more often they are smaller.
Every time you see someone suffering and you offer comfort, every time you are kind to someone you encounter even though you are having a bad day, every time you show up to be among the comparatively anonymous group of people contributing to a positive collective endeavor, it is important both to your own self-efficacy and more broadly. We often can’t evaluate the ripple effects of our actions in a concrete way, but if you have ever seen the course of your day change because someone was kind to you while you were vulnerable, you have therefore had the visceral experience of being one of those ripples, imbuing your own actions and interactions with more light and less burden, which invariably ripples still further out. When we dismiss the significance of our micro-actions on our life’s work, we turn away from vast opportunities to participate in positive change and we lose hope unnecessarily.
This is where the idea of the inner compass becomes vital. If we measure our agency through the lens of often reality-adjacent media depictions of difference-makers we run the dual risk of being paralyzed by unrealistic expectations and of measuring our actions and potential actions through a lens that revolves more around status and ego than true sense of purpose. It is likely that everyone reading this has had the experience, at least at fleeting moments, of acting decisively because the need to do so was intuitively obvious. Maybe it was participating in a protest surrounding a cause meaningful to you, maybe it was some other form of collective action, maybe it was “just” showing up for a loved one, maybe it was extracting yourself from a group engaging in actions you didn’t believe in. Whatever the specifics, if you have ever had this experience then you know what it feels like to step away from self-judgment, to step away from the sense of needing to portray yourself in a particular light to your peers or consumers of social media, and simply step up in accordance with what is important to you.
The premise is at once straightforward and complicated. It is similar to the notion of stepping back and asking yourself “what would Jesus (or insert other person/entity you look up to) do?” The difference is that you are asking what YOU would do if you were to embody the principles of your higher self. This is why I refer to the process as calibrating the inner compass. The greater the extent to which you understand your values, beliefs, ideals, and aspirations, the greater the likelihood that you will intuitively know how to respond to a situation that invites some sort of action. It is straightforward in the sense that there can be a striking level of clarity even in the face of daunting obstacles when we have done this work, and it is complicated in the sense that doing this work requires time, patience, vulnerability, and honesty.
Those who choose to commit to this process regardless of inner challenges and societal pressures will inevitably see benefit in personal contexts like their relationships and their overall sense of inner peace. Maybe less obviously, it is the anchor for maintaining hope and developing the ability to make challenging decisions without getting as bogged down. Looking inward and asking what your higher self would do becomes a way to strip away the ego-based concerns and align with a deeper sense of what spirit you intend to govern your actions. This will ripple outward both to long-term, meticulously planned endeavors and to responding to challenging circumstances that emerge suddenly and unpredictably. Because there is no accurate way to measure your worldly impact in any kind of objective, quantifiable manner, you can become liberated to also consider the seemingly more esoteric metric of the extent to which, when looking in the mirror at the end of the day, you feel at peace that the person looking back did what they reasonably could to embody their core principles.
My own embrace of this ethos was admittedly convoluted. On the one hand it was baked into the essence of my development as a musician. Once I committed to pursuing a high level of proficiency and expressiveness as a jazz musician, I saw the ways that so many of my heroes were tuned in and uninhibited in their embrace of the present moment and the ways that being that way was built on the rigor of their studies. My first jazz mentor, George Raccio, explained to me the seeming dichotomy of John Coltrane’s music, wherein he practiced tirelessly so that he could give himself fully to the moment and yet trust that the “good stuff” would still come out. Around that time I saw an interview with Herbie Hancock when he described the point at which his thousands of hours of practicing and performing coalesced into an ability to bypass his conscious mind and go directly from a sonic or emotional impulse to his hands arriving at the manifestation of that impulse at the piano. This was a formative ideal in music and has remained so.
And yet in the rest of my life I remained prone to agonizing over decisions in ways that were stressful and inefficient. Part of this was worry over the consequences of making the wrong decision (I suppose my kids would call it FOMO) but at a certain point I realized that part of it was inadequate clarity over end goals. I started to realize that if evaluating the pros and cons of whether to pursue or accept a particular performance opportunity revolved around small-picture considerations, I would often find myself chasing my tail in circles. If, on the other hand, I had a clear picture of my goals and my path, even if an abstract picture based more on energetic goals than tangible external benchmarks, then that decision-making process became substantially more straightforward. I started to experiment with “going with the gut” more and found it effective, though only insofar as I was training my gut to identify how a given decision aligned with the big picture of my life’s ideal trajectory.
It was not long before I started to see this manifest in contexts far more consequential than whether I should say yes or no to a gig. I am hesitant to go into vivid detail in print about some of the most intimate examples of ways I have depended on my inner compass (respecting the others involved, ask me in person sometime if you want) but I hope you will take my word that some of the most life-altering decisions I have ever made occurred without delay or hesitation. I am not a religious person, per se, but there have been moments when the universe presented me with highly consequential crossroads moments. I ostensibly had the choice between turning toward my true purpose and doing something difficult but important or turning away from it, whether by shrinking from the moment or hemming and hawing until the moment for action had passed. But I perceive that these were “choices” only in the abstract, because I had already made the broader choice to calibrate my inner compass and as a result there was no room to behave in a manner that would betray that.
The ideal of longing to “fix” deep society-wide issues remains inevitable for any person of conscience, but through this lens it is tempered with a sense of expectation that revolves more around doing what we can whenever and however we can. Just as the reality that we will all die someday doesn’t trivialize our lives and the acts of kindness towards us, the reality that we can’t entirely undo a big-picture hardship doesn’t trivialize how important it is to ease suffering on any level we can. And then we wake up and do it again, because we know on a deep level that it matters.
Our inner compass tells us so, and we believe it because we have been meticulous in cultivating it to do exactly that. What form “doing it again” takes may align with the plans we made when we went to bed or it may take a totally unexpected form spurred by a need for further inner inquiry and alignment or by external conditions that catch us by surprise. Either way, this commitment represents an escape from the vicious cycle of disillusionment leading to stasis and stasis leading to disillusionment. In its place we have the nourishing cycle of acting from a place of sincere awareness of why goodness is important, leading to experiences that stoke our hope and determination even when the work is difficult. If this results in more obvious and visible forms of activism, that’s great, but knowing that making the world tangibly better does not need to wait until you are prepared to move mountains is plenty great already. While devoting time and energy to calibrating your inner compass may seem self-indulgent to some, there is no escaping the truth that the world needs your light to shine as brightly as possible.
Noah Baerman is the Director of Wesleyan University Jazz Ensemble and a Visiting Professor in Continuing Studies. He can be reached at nbaerman@wesleyan.edu.
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