Mystery/thriller writer Harlan Coben’s Myron Bolitar series used to be a guilty pleasure of mine. There was a point in the last decade in which I was gobbling up two or three books per week. Then the 2016 election happened, and I took a long, hard look at my reading list. Coben is a great author, but I needed a lot less machismo and a lot more diversity.

I didn’t pick up any more of his books until I needed a quick read last week. I tore through The Boy From the Woods, the first in Coben’s new series. I was cruising along until a character (who bears a lot of similarities to our most recent former president) spouts off a PR plan in response to the release of a video in which he is sexually harassing a woman who might or might not legally be an adult. The character tells his people to put out all of the following messages and more: it’s a training tape about proper workplace behavior, it was a run-through of the woman’s (nonexistent) Me Too screenplay, she was asking for the harassment, the tape was faked.

Again, Coben is a great writer, but I remembered then why I took him off my reading list for my own mental health. The calculating nature of this character was too much for me. How do we work for change in the world when so many people will do anything to preserve their own power?

At the same time I was reading parts of Martha Beck’s The Way of Integrity for my DMin ethics class. (Talk about whiplash.) I grabbed onto one of her concepts in chapter 14: everywhere in nature there are fractals, which are patterns that reiterate infinitely, forming versions of themselves at different sizes. What this means is if we are able to live in our integrity, faithfully doing the internal and external work to which we have been called, that work scales up so that we are shaping the people around us and the institutions in which we participate. It might not be very visible - we must have eyes to see the fractals in nature, much less in human interactions - but it is happening as surely as hydrogen atoms bonding together in rings of six when water molecules collide at low temperatures, creating snowflakes made up of variations on a hexagon shape.

So take heart. Root yourself in your values. Use your gifts. Stay true to your call. You are changing the world from the ground up. If enough of us do this, the lie-perpetuators and power-hoarders don’t stand a chance.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash.