Sunday Soul: Creative Resistance

On yesterday's Amicus podcast (required listening), Ahilan Arulanantham, a human rights lawyer and UCLA law professor, counseled "creative resistance," to the challenges of our day. How did he articulate those challenges?

He called the present administration "lawless," not only in its willingness to ignore judges orders, but also because of the number of decisions coming down from the Supreme Court on the shadow docket without legal reasoning. The current Supreme Court literally isn't practicing law. Lower court judges don't know how to interpret decisions that are changing long-held precedent without explanation, or that are directly contradicting previous opinions by the same court (not using race in college admissions, for example, but allowing it to be used for the purposes of racial profiling in law enforcement). He said that lawyers and judges find themselves needing to exercise "creative resistance."

This phrase is echoing in my mind, this Sunday morning. What does creative resistance mean in this moment for each of us? Certainly we have all had periods of time in our own lives when an institution, belief, or person had changed, and we had to move through our lives without its guidance.

I recently published a book for people in just such phases, for people in grief. You can find it here. There's a chapter on creativity, where I draw from the work of Martha Beck's new book on the relationship between anxiety and creativity. Her ideas are helpful for this moment. She writes,

“Anxiety spirals pull us away from the world. Creativity spirals pull us into it. Curiosity, the sensation that begins the creativity spiral, is the force that tempts many young animals, including humans, to experiment with new experiences. Where anxiety makes us avoid more and more of the world, curiosity draws us forward, helping us to get used to unexplored environments and unfamiliar experiences. Anxiety retracts; curiosity expands.”[i]

Many times each day we face this choice - anxiety or creativity, expansion or contraction. Some folks seem to think that anxiety is a love language, or if they worry about a thing that is a way to control it, but really that is just a drain on one's energy. What we need in this moment is to shift out of patterns of anxiety toward periods of creativity, or more specifically, creative resistance. Rather than wasting our own energy, we direct it toward exploration of the terrain of the new world we inhabit.

How can we become curious in this moment about this moment? And how can we leverage that curiosity to pull us out of thought spirals that distract from useful action, and into thought spirals that draw us deeper into engagement with one another and our political system?

The next time you are tempted by anxiety, see if there is any curiosity lurking in the shadows that you can turn to. And how might you go about answering the questions that arise from that place, how might you spiral into creative resistance?

I'm a student of Chinese medicine, and as such have some experience practicing Qi gong, a gentle movement practice from the Chinese tradition. The most powerful action is a spiral. You can try it for yourself, stand tall and move your hands in small spiral motions toward the body. I have found that the smaller spiral that you make, the more qi (energy, life force) you gather. My experience with spirals in Qi gong suggest that the smaller we start, the better.

Start small, but spiral into some creative resistance today.

[i] Martha Beck. Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose. New York: Viking, 2025.