I heard national treasure Bill Moyers interview a brilliant and courageous woman named Vandana Shiva.   You can hear their discussion here.   At one point Moyers asks her how she can continue to fight huge, immensely wealthy and aggressive agricultural multinationals with such little hope of success.  She tells him of a passage from the Bhagavad Gita that explains it is not whether you can succeed or not that determines whether you should do a thing, but whether you have an obligation to do it.   It resonated deeply for me.

The following week Bill Moyers interviewed Chris Hedges, former seminary student, who came to his calling– speaking truth to power– from a Christian perspective.  After discussing Hedges’s work witnessing slaughter, systemic poverty and oppression the world over, and writing and speaking about it in eloquent detail, Moyers asks him the same question.  How can you, a good person driven to despair, continue to resist in the face of such odds?  Hedges gives the same answer Vandana Shiva gave the week before.  We are obliged to do what is right, no matter if we can succeed in changing things or not.  

This rang that bell of mindfulness inside me again.  Death waits for each of us, more patiently or less patiently.  What would you do now if you knew for certain that you had six weeks to live?   What would you do if you had six years?  Or twenty-six? The question seems to call for the same answer.  Do what you are called to do, what makes you feel most useful, what makes the richest demands of your talents without diminishing you.  

One thing not to do is spend a second more than is necessary with people who prove toxic to your unique and infinitely precious self.