The thin edge between the safe and the danger zone is Joan Halifax’s “edge state”.

This year is ripping good people to shreds. I know it. You know it. There’s no need to rehash the details. It’s hard. It’s painful. Pandemics and racism don’t seem to have been vanquished while we slept last night. We’re waking up today and fighting the good fight. Again. Still.

I read this incredibly beautifully, wise, insightful, generous book recently (Standing at the Edge by Joan Halifax). It gave me vocabulary to understand some of the bleak and nasty feels that seem inevitable for folks who are in the make-the-world-a-better-place space.

Halifax has spent decades working for peace and civil rights and caring for the dying. She’s also a Buddhist teacher. This book captures the lessons she has learned about the pitfalls of activism and caregiving. She then gives instruction to people on the front lines who want to remain whole in the face of great pain. It’s the survival manual you didn’t know you needed.

Social change and support work takes place close to the edge of a cliff, says Halifax. People in these fields demonstrate incredible strengths like empathy and engagement with the world when they walk on solid ground. But it is very easy to lose your footing and fall off a cliff. This thin edge is Halifax’s “edge state”.

You’ve heard of burnout - it’s a scourge of nonprofit work. Well that’s the dangerous side of engagement, the otherwise glorious feeling of being energized by your work, involved, and effective. Push your engaged self too far, and you will burn out.

The thing I’d never heard of was “moral suffering”. This concept just blew my mind. It’s lodged in my brain and won’t shake loose.

I feel like this was written for people grappling with the year that is 2020. If you can’t articulate a persistent grim frustration, or if you’re trying to understand why people are traumatized by what they see happening around them, this offers insight and vocabulary that explains so much.

Moral suffering is “the harm we experience in relation to actions that transgress our tenets of basic human goodness.”

In other words, you’re out there trying to be good and do good. You’re an imperfect squishy human, but you’re trying. Meanwhile, this truly nasty stuff is happening around you. You are harmed just by being there, at the same time, co-existing.

What’s happening around you hurts you, even if it’s not happening directly to you. Sound familiar?

There are four types of moral suffering

Moral distress is the feeling of being aware of a moral problem. You know what to do, but you are unable to act. You feel pain and responsibility and guilt and frustration but you can’t change the outcome. You’re trapped.

Moral injury is the psychological wound you get when you witness a problematic act or you participate in one yourself. These wounds can last years or lifetimes. This is more than feeling. These wounds are now part of you.

This idea of moral injury struck a deep chord with me: I don’t know if North American culture has an appropriate appreciation for how an individual can be harmed by what they see happening to others around them. We like to think that victims have to be the direct targets of an act of violence or hatred or virus. But we aren’t as independent as we think we are, and many of us are walking around with the wounds to prove it.

Moral outrage is an expression of indignation at what you have seen, but pushed to a point where it leads to anger, emotional over-arousal and lack of balance. A little outrage is good and healthy. But when it goes too far, you start causing harm to others and injuring yourself. It leads to more distress and injury.

Moral apathy is when we deny or don’t want to know about situations that are causing harm. We cannot stay engaged with the world and create beneficial change if we decide to tune out. The solution, Halifax says, is not to quit. We shouldn’t be so afraid of pain and injury that we give up trying. We shouldn’t cultivate ignorance because it feels safer and less threatening. That also leads to more distress and injury.

Halifax gives very practical, Buddhist inspired suggestions for keeping yourself whole while you are visiting the edge states. The world needs change, she says, and your job is to get as close to the edge as possible without falling over.

Also, importantly, if you’re experiencing one of these states, know that you are not alone. You are one of thousands of people from many countries across many years who have discovered the cliff edge. You found it because you care about the world and because you are testing the boundaries of what’s possible. You can continue your quest and be whole. You do not have to choose safety over justice and love.

This Howard Zinn quote sums it all up: