Questions That Help Us Grow

When I first read Emergent Strategy, I immediately knew it was going to be one of those books I revisited often. It’s been just that. I own multiple paper copies, a digital copy and an audio version. I recommend it to all of my friends and share it on my social media often. This book is… transformative. It is full of quotes, musings, actionable steps and big questions. It was brought to my attention by my friend Riles when I joined their online book club, Soft Hearts Book Club. I’m forever grateful for the books Riles has recommended to me and I’m also grateful that I get to pass this recommendation on to you.

From adrienne’s website:

“adrienne maree brown grows healing ideas in public through her multi-genre writing, her music and her podcasts. Informed by 25 years of movement facilitation, somatics, Octavia E Butler scholarship and her work as a doula, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination and Transformative Justice as ideas and practices for transformation. She is the author/editor of several published texts, cogenerator of a tarot deck and a developing musical ritual.”

The book is absolutely full to the brim with wisdom, but right here I want to highlight some of the questions she poses when discussing transformative justice. These are questions I’ve found personally impactful and as I carry them with me daily, they’ve changed how I see the world and the compassion I have for myself and for others. These questions are often used in the context of interpersonal conflict resolution and navigating relationships between people, but they’re also questions that can be applied in other areas of our lives. They help us navigate differing beliefs, communication differences, structural and systemic oppression, and so much more.

Question 1: Why? Listen with “Why?”

This question opens us up to understanding, it gives us context and helps us get past the idea that there are quick fixes. This question is humanizing and gets to the root of issues.

“Demonizing is more efficient than relinquishing our world views, which is why we have slavery, holocausts, lynchings, and witch trials in our short human history. ‘Why?’ can be an evolutionary question.” -adrienne maree brown

Question 2: Ask yourself/selves: what can I/we learn from this?

There are lessons to be found in everything: tragedy, joy, all of it. Investigate, challenge, compare, connect. Process, imagine and eventually apply that learning.

“If the only thing I can learn from a situation is that some humans do bad things, it’s a waste of my precious time - I already know that. What I want to know is: What can this teach me/us about how to improve on our humanity?” -adrienne maree brown

Question 3: How can my real-time actions contribute to transforming this situation(versus making it worse)?

Ask yourself: What is the motivation behind your actions? What are you trying to accomplish? What is the outcome you’re hoping for? Will your actions improve the situation?

“Transformative justice requires us, at a minimum, to ask ourselves questions like these before we jump, teeth bared, for the jugular. I think this is some of the hardest work. It’s not about pack hunting an external enemy, it’s about deep shifts in our own ways of being.” -adrienne maree brown

According to adrienne maree brown, transformative justice is, “justice practices that go all the way to the root of the problem and generate solutions and healing there, such that the conditions that create injustice are transformed.” She writes, “Transformative justice, in the context of emergent strategy, asks us to consider how to transform toxic energy, hurt, legitimate pain, and conflict into solutions. To get under the wrong, find a way to coexist, to be energy moving toward life, together.”

Every day we can live our lives on the principles of liberation for all. We can live our lives on the principles of transformative justice. We can live our lives on the principles of interdependence. We’re stronger together.

Check your local library for a copy of Emergent Strategy or any of her other incredible books. You can also get a copy from bookshop.org or from my Amazon affiliate link here. To find it on audio, check out Libro.fm or Audible.