You know the sign. You have seen it a hundred times.
“Don’t Feed the Animals”
There is a reason that sign exists. When you feed them they keep coming back. They get bolder. They lose their fear. And before long they are running the place while you are backing up trying to figure out what happened.
Sound familiar?
Right now there are animals everywhere. Not the kind with four legs. The kind that show up in your news feed before you finish your first cup of coffee. The kind that pile one thing on top of another, day after day, until the weight of it starts to feel like it is yours to carry. Bad news. Bad actors. Bad decisions made by people who answer to nobody and seem to answer for nothing.
They are counting on you to feed them. Every click. Every argument. Every sleepless night spent spinning on things you cannot change before sunrise. That is the food they run on. Your energy. Your attention. Your frustration handed over freely like you had it to spare.
Stop feeding them.
I want to talk about the other word for a minute. Resolve.
Not the bumper sticker version. Not the fist-in-the-air version. The real one.
Resolve means you have settled something inside yourself. You have sorted through the noise and found the answer that was waiting under it. You have decided — firmly, clearly, without apology — on a course of action. And once that decision is made the animals lose their power over you because you are no longer reacting. You are moving.
That is what they cannot handle. A person who has resolved something is not available for distraction. Not available for discouragement. Not available for the daily feeding frenzy of outrage and exhaustion they keep setting out like bait.
Feed your resolve instead.
Feed it with the truth of what you know. Feed it with the memory of what this country has come through before. Feed it with the faces of the people you are doing this for — the ones at your table, the ones coming up behind you, the ones who will inherit whatever we leave them.
Feed it with action when action is possible. A phone call. A conversation. A vote. Showing up when showing up is what is called for.
And in the waiting — because there is always waiting — feed it with patience. Not the passive kind that just sits and hopes. The active kind that holds position, stays sharp, and does not give an inch of ground to despair.
The animals will keep coming. That is what they do. They are persistent because they are hungry and hunger makes things bold.
But you do not have to feed them.
You have something better to do with what you have got.
Feed your resolve. Settle what needs settling inside yourself. Decide your course. Hold it.
The animals can find somewhere else to eat.
Post Library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
