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In Books, Culture, Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth, Politics, Spiritual Life, Writing

Morality Still Matters

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

Lately, scrolling through the news makes me so depressed that one question keeps floating up through my subconscious into my feverish mind: Does morality still matter? Is it important to care about what’s right and what’s wrong when so few people in positions of power (or their supporters) no longer seem to give a shit?

To find an answer, I turned to Omar El Akkad’s newest book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. He’s a brilliant writer, and I adore his novels, so I knew his thoughts on the ongoing hellish nightmare that is the oppression of the Palestinian people in Gaza would help me unlock the deer-in-the-headlights feeling I’ve had about this monstrosity.

Not only did Omar El Akkad help me to better understand the nuances, he stirred up within my soul a twinned grief and rage that I’ve been trying to subdue, but find that these feelings have now been unleashed. And along with them I feel a blanket of shame, that I waited so long to engage my compassion and find the courage to use my voice.

In El Akkad’s book, he makes the point so much better than I could that morality still matters. That the performative noise we make in the west as liberals so we can feel like good people while doing nothing practical that could cost us personally or professionally is not only useless, it’s damaging to our souls and does real damage to people on the other side of the world.

In One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This Omar El Akkad writes “The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again: when it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power? What makes moments such as this one so dangerous, so clarifying, is that one way or another everyone is forced to answer.”

If we can’t care about starving children shot while trying to get scraps of food, then our moral compass is broken. My moral compass has been broken, because I was afraid to access my compassion. To speak up when it might be politically unpopular to do so. To tell myself that the issues were too complex for me to understand. But a live-streamed genocide that I choose to ignore so I don’t have to get involved is not complicated. It’s simple cowardice.

When writing about how western liberals try to have it both ways, by feeling like moral human beings while doing nothing to stop these atrocities, El Akkad asks, “How does one finish the sentence: It is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but…”

I finally know how to finish that sentence. It’s well past time for action. To recognise and state aloud that my morality is meaningless when it might cost me something so I do nothing to help. Each one of us must draw a line and say we side with justice or with power. We cannot do both. The people of Gaza, like the people of Ukraine, need our help. If you are like me and you read novels about acts of courage during World War II, then we are well past our moment to step up and say, “no more.”

I don’t know exactly what this means for me, or for you, or for any of us. But I know that looking away is not an option. Choosing not to care because it hurts is cowardly. All of that apathy turns us away from ourselves, from our souls, from our shared humanity. We have to care about starving children like they were our beloved children. Because they are.

I don’t want war. I want peace. But I also want justice for those who are oppressed and starved and beaten and murdered because of politics and power. If I believe morality still matters, then this matters. Even when it costs me something, I have to be willing to act. To not stay silent. To do my part, whatever that part is, to stop this evil and to engage all of my grief, rage, and shame for taking so long and turning away so callously.

I’ll leave you with two quotes. The first is from Angela Davis, who writes “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” And the second is from Omar El Akkad’s must-read book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This: “How can you hope for anything to change if you won’t participate in the work of changing it? How can you have any moral standing if you are so susceptible to abandoning hope?”

In Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth, Relationships, Spiritual Life, Writing

The Long Yearn

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

The first word I chose to focus on in 2025 is deeper, and boy, did I get walloped with it weeks into the new year. It felt like unshed tears, a tightness in my throat, a pressure in my chest, and a tingling in my nose. Going deeper seemed to mean allowing my feelings their full range, and at the beginning this looked like grief and sadness.

As time went on, I thought of this process as The Long Yearn. I felt stirred up, hyper-aware of people, things, and experiences that I had yearned for since childhood and early adulthood. I missed my Granny, who died in 2008, with a keen sense of loss. I longed for the career I wanted to have in the film industry. I felt the absence of my own mother and siblings, who are alive but emotionally distant from me.

This process felt like sandpaper on raw skin. I felt up close in my own life and feelings, while also standing apart from me to notice what I missed and what was lost or too far away to grasp. The overall experience was one of grief—I saw myself standing on the edge of what I longed for but couldn’t reach.

More than once in the last six weeks I’ve wished I’d chosen another word besides deeper. When I picked it, I was thinking of it as an intellectual exercise. But our human emotions don’t function like that. What I was initially looking for was a way to deepen my work. To stay away from the surface when I wrote, to stop playing it safe and dive below into the churning mess below day-to-day life.

What I didn’t realise was what that process would cost me. It’s hard down in the depths of our being and our consciousness. That’s where the old stuff from our childhood is buried. That’s where the pain and the loss and the longing and the trapped love with no one to give it to lives. And it’s not intellectual. It’s the subconscious, which means our soul needs to feel it.

The Long Yearn is how I’m describing this murky expanse that I cannot reach with my mind. This is a feeling place. It’s dark, like the sky at midnight, with a bit of hazy purple around the edges. It’s a graveyard for lost hopes and dreams. It’s where the relationships that ended are stored. And all of these areas are swamped with pain.

I’m learning how to feel it and not crumble. I know it’s leading me somewhere. Taking me by the hand and tugging on my spirit. The Long Yearn is unveiling me to myself. I feel so consciously aware of my inner landscape when I’m in this longing space, but it requires tenacity to stay here and not to run to the safer confines of my logical mind.

If we want depth, we have to go to the depths. We have to face up to what we may never achieve, and the people who might not want to love us, and the fears we’ve tried to pretend we don’t have. It’s all here, part of this yearning expansive space inside of us, but we need courage to sit with it. I can see my failings in here. And I can also see my strengths and abilities, clearer than usual.

I’m trying not to rush this. I wanted to go deeper, and now I know how hard it is to do so. But I believe this work will bear fruit. I know that I will make it through this and get to the other side. I know this because I’ve done it before, many times over. There’s no way to get to deeper without swimming through this murky place. Most of the true things in life we can’t think our way into. The way to travel there is to feel, and to feel it all.

In Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth, Relationships, Spiritual Life

Hinges

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

We went to a funeral recently, the first one in a long time. The man who died was the grandfather of one of Ava’s earliest friends. I remember him as kind and quiet whenever we met at christenings, children’s birthday parties, or family dinners.

His funeral drew hundreds of people. It was a beautiful service, and I felt melancholy and reflective for the rest of the day after the morning mass. I began to think about my own legacy—what I will leave behind when I die.

I grew up as an evangelical Christian. In that world, we talked a lot about death but the focus was on going to heaven. I was terrified that I’d die and be denied entrance to heaven for some arbitrary reason. I worried constantly about ending up in hell.

When I moved away from my evangelical beliefs a decade ago, my fear of death slowly lost its grip on me. I began the practice of daily guided meditation. Over time, I could imagine dying without feeling a choking fear that God would be angry with me and refuse to allow me into heaven, no matter how hard I’d worked at being good and worthy.

Now, when I imagine death, it feels like a hinge. And life is full of these hinges—areas where we finish one chapter and move into a new one. We all experience so many cycles of death and rebirth. We change, we evolve, we begin and end something over and over.

I had to catch myself from competitive thinking after the funeral I attended. I asked Jason, “How many people do you think will come to my funeral?” This question caused me to worry that I haven’t kept up with enough old friends. That maybe I haven’t given to people as much over the last decade compared to how social I used to be when the kids were small.

Some of this happens naturally as we age. We experience ebbs and flows in our social lives, depending on the season of life we are in. I wrote in my journal to process these feelings, reminding myself that life and death and funeral numbers are not a competition.

The lovely man who died this month won’t ever know how many lives he had touched to inspire hundreds of people to attend his celebration of life. But his family knew. And it meant something to them. Each person who came and who shared their memories helped the family to feel less alone. And the legacy he left will endure. His love lives on in his children and grandchildren.

It’s healthy at hinge moments in our lives to reflect on what matters the most. I realised while writing in my journal that I felt a sense of deep loss when I heard family members speak about this man’s death, because he was so warm and kind and loving. I didn’t experience a relationship like that with my own father, and even though he’s been dead for twenty-two years, I wish I had known that kind of support and care from him.

We can never go back. Only forward. I’m relieved not to feel a paralysing fear any longer when I imagine dying. I think we can practice this comfort level by being more intentional about the other endings and beginnings we experience throughout our lives. With each hinge that opens and closes, we move closer to the final one. We never know when it will come. All we can do is live and love to the best of our ability, and try to remain present and attentive to each day as it comes.

How do you feel about death? Does it cause fear when you consider your own mortality? What type of hinges help you feel more at peace when you think about the end of your life?

In Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth, Relationships, Spiritual Life

Struggling

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

How are you doing this fall? I’m struggling.

I keep telling myself it will be better when I get some space to relax. When I have less to do and fewer deadlines to meet. But that never seems to happen. I finish one “must-complete” project and there’s ten more after it. The space to process my feelings doesn’t appear, so I remain sad and frustrated.

I’ve been working with a new counsellor for the last few weeks. It’s helping, in that I feel less alone and it’s lovely to hear new coping strategies from her, but it’s also not helping, because I feel like I’m only two steps in while attempting to climb Mount Everest.

In these challenging seasons, everything feels much harder than it should. I’m sick of only seeing shades of grey where I used to see vibrant colour. I’m bored of feeling sad and flat where once I felt hopeful and at peace.

I know this will pass. But that doesn’t really help on the shittiest days. It’s too far away to count. It’s an idea, not a reality. Asking for help in the form of counselling was difficult for me, because it meant admitting that I’m lost and don’t know where to go from here. I kept telling myself that I’ve had loads of therapy and I should know better. That’s when I knew I was in trouble.

This pandemic is dragging on forever. Not just for me, but for everybody. We all long for some kind of certainty and normalcy, if for no other reason than to just feel stable again. It’s exhausting looking into the future and only seeing a long series of question marks. Part of me knows there’s no real certainty, but in a pandemic this fact becomes crystal clear, with very little to hide or obscure it.

It’s so easy to tell someone else that the struggle is where the growth is found. No cost is associated with saying those words, but in the Mondays and Tuesdays of our lives it just plain hurts to feel you are in the dark. We set up our Christmas trees last week and when the lights come on in the late afternoon, I feel a tiny dart of joy, because for a few hours the darkness is pushed away.

The only way out is through. It’s one foot in front of the other, with additional grace and kindness to get me through these days. I’m tired. I miss my cat, Little Rose, who died in September. I feel adrift and sad. I think the key is to say it out loud; to let these emotions bloom in the dark instead of trying to pretend they aren’t there. Reaching out to other people helps. So does making space to journal, meditate, walk, breathe, create.

It’s a hard season, friends. What are you doing to look after yourself at the end of this pandemic year?

In Culture, Identity, Minimalism, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships, Spiritual Life

The Spaces Between

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

This holiday season, as we reflect on the year we leave behind and think about the one about to begin, my hope is that we find peace in the quiet of the spaces between.

So much of our culture revolves around hustle. Be busy, achieve success, look great, do a lot but make it seem effortless. For me, this is not a path to happiness. My heart longs for less. Smaller. Quieter. I’m interested in the spaces between the accomplishments, where the buzz recedes into the distance and you can hear the echo of peace.

This may sound easy, but I assure you it’s not. Living an intentionally quiet and small existence at the end of 2019 takes a lot of focus and effort. I have to endlessly remind myself that I’m good enough, just as I am, and I’m here to pass this message along to you.

The spaces between things is where the interesting stuff resides. It’s the pause after the heartbeat that makes the human body function. The rest in the music is why we can distinguish one note or lyric from another. The space is where we settle down so we can see what we actually have to be grateful for.

Right now, before the holiday season is upon us, seems like a beautiful time to find peace in the spaces between. Notice how much you love the people you spend your time with. Pet your cat or dog and appreciate their warmth on these long winter nights. May the Christmas lights remind us that not everything is dark after all.

The only permission we need to rest and be grateful comes from ourselves. We don’t need committee approval for how we choose to spend our time. These important decisions of renewal and gratitude come from inside of us. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

May we settle into the spaces between and wrap the silence around us like a blanket. Be here, in this moment, and know that this is what really matters. Let’s find peace in the quiet, to end one year and purposefully begin the next one.