The past few years were life-altering on a global scale, affecting the day-to-day experiences of every single person on the planet — former first ladies not excluded. For Michelle Obama, the spread of the COVID-19 virus and subsequent quarantine left her feeling lost, hopeless and afraid. That struggle led her down a path of reflection and also sparked a question: When the world feels so dark, how do you find and protect your own light?
That became the premise for The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times, which Obama wrote during quarantine. The bestseller explores the tools she developed to move forward with positivity in her own life, and also to help others cope with life’s challenges. For the final stop of her book tour, Obama sat down with Oprah Winfrey to discuss these methods, and in The Light We Carry: Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey, the former First Lady shares stories and extraordinarily vulnerable insights about her childhood, her marriage, aging, friendships and more. She also explores a valuable, difficult lesson that everyone has to learn, and one that her beloved father instilled within her from childhood: The light you carry inside of you can’t be, and will never be, dependent on anyone else. In other words, the job of finding and protecting your light is yours and yours alone, and you owe it to yourself to figure out how to stay shining.
In The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times, Obama offers a narrative toolkit she developed to deal with stress and uncertainty — you won’t find rigid instructions within its pages, but instead an anecdotal and down-to-earth approach to sharing what works for her. Explore three of Obama’s most powerful tools to relocate your spark, inspiring stories from Mrs. Obama and tangible thought-starters you can ask yourself right now to get started.
During the first weeks of the pandemic in 2020, Obama says she found herself overwhelmed — and not just by the uncertainty and danger that came with a frightening global emergency, but also by the fact that everything she heard and saw on the news felt massive and consequential. Though she’d spent her life in service of others, this time there was nothing she could do.
Around that time, she bought herself a pair of knitting needles. She wasn’t sure exactly why she was buying them at the time, but in The Light We Carry, she writes that one tiny decision led her to “the kind of volcanic clarity that comes when you speak from the absolute center of your being.”
“What’s perhaps strange to say is that I’m not sure I would have gotten there without the period of enforced stillness and the steadiness I found inside of knitting,” she writes in the book. “I’d had to go small in order to think big again. Shaken by the enormity of everything that was happening, I’d needed my hands to reintroduce me to what was good, simple and accomplishable. And that turned out to be a lot.”
Knitting became a meditative practice that served to not only quiet her mind and accomplish something while everything else was frozen in time but also a way to combat against the idea that the only worthwhile efforts are the ones that make a huge impact. “Knitting was there, though, buried in my DNA. It turns out that I am the descendant of many seamstresses,” she writes. “When little else was reliable in life, you could rely on your own two hands.”
Of course, it’s not really about the knitting itself. Obama says that there are a number of ways to start small with what’s in front of you — it’s really just figuring out what works for you and brings you a sense of forward motion and relief. In the book, she describes an “arsenal of fixes” that she’s used, including taking a walk outdoors, sweating through a workout or taking a shower and putting on fresh clothes.
“Sometimes I find that I’m helped by helping — by doing even one small thing to make somebody else’s day easier or brighter,” she writes. “Often, I just need to reset my mood with a good laugh.”
Kick-start your spark:
If you find yourself overwhelmed by the bigger problems in your life — and the time, resources and emotional strength they might take to solve — allow yourself to pause. What are some of the small ways you can feel better about your week, day or even next hour? What’s something tangible you can reach for to tend to, enjoy or use to generate a new idea? Make a list of your own “arsenal of fixes” and choose one that feels best in the moment.
Extra shine from Michelle:
“Maybe, like me, you are hard on yourself,” she writes. “Maybe you see every problem as urgent. Maybe you want to do big things with your life, to drive yourself forward with a bold agenda, not wasting a single second of time. That’s all good, and you are not wrong to want to go for big things. But once in a while, you’ll want to allow yourself the pleasure of a small feat. You’re going to need to step back and rest your brain from all the hard problems and wearying thoughts. Because the hard problems and wearying thoughts will always be there, largely unfinished and mostly unfixed. The holes will always be big, the answers slow to come.
So, in the meantime, claim a small victory. Understand that it’s okay to be productive in a small way, to invest in endeavors that are adjacent to your big goals and larger dreams. Find one thing you can actively complete and give yourself over to it, even if it is of no immediate benefit to anybody but yourself.”
In The Light We Carry, Obama recalls her childhood in Chicago, specifically the kitchen in her family’s apartment on Euclid Avenue. She says that no matter what her day was like, she could come home, sit down at her kitchen table and know that she was “safe, accepted and at home.”
She also says that the kitchen table became a “magnet” for other people — neighbors with a wild story to tell, cousins flooding in to prepare a chaotic peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and heartfelt family conversations. That small table with a vinyl tablecloth became an anchor, offering her comfort, security and consistency over the years.
It also inspired her to refer to her nearest and dearest as her “Kitchen Table.”
“A Kitchen Table, in general, is never stagnant,” she writes. “Friends will come and go, taking on more or less importance as you move through different phases of life. You may have a small group of friends, or just a few one-on-one friendships. All of that is okay. What matters most is the quality of your relationships. It’s good to be discerning about who you trust, who you bring close.”
She also explains that no matter who’s currently around your Kitchen Table, or who comes in and out of those seats over the years, it’s a support system and sounding board that can ground you and stave off the harmful effects of loneliness, an emotion that can be incredibly damaging to the human psyche. Obama writes that even before the pandemic, Americans were consistently reporting that what was missing from their lives was a sense of belonging or “feeling at home” with other people.
“Research has shown that loneliness actually can compound on itself,” she writes. “A lonely brain becomes hyper-tuned to social threats, which can lead us to isolate further. Disconnection from others makes us more susceptible to conspiratorial and superstitious thinking. And this, in turn, can leave us mistrustful of those who are not like us. Which, of course, becomes another way of getting stuck.”
And what’s the best way to get unstuck from that cycle of disconnection? Filling those empty seats. Of course, that doesn’t mean that just anyone should be allowed at your Kitchen Table. In The Light We Carry special, Obama explores more of what she calls the “slow ghost” — in other words, when there are people in your life who aren’t serving you, there comes a point where you have to make the decision for yourself to pull away.
Kick-start your spark:
Consider the people at your own Kitchen Table. How do those people enrich your life and how do you connect with them? The people at your Kitchen Table don’t have to know each other, nor do they all have to serve the same purpose. Obama’s Kitchen Table, for example, includes her roommate from college, her bestie from law school, her mom friends from Chicago where she raised Sasha and Malia in their early lives and the wives she met during her time in the White House. Make a list of those you consider valued members of your own Kitchen Table, and consider how you might cultivate those relationships and create ritual around them — it could be as simple as a phone call or a weekly coffee, to something more elaborate and intentional like an annual gathering or trip away. Finally, what are some ways you can expand your own life in the hope of adding new seats?
Extra shine from Michelle:
“Life has shown me that strong friendships are most often the result of strong intentions. Your table needs to be deliberately built, deliberately populated and deliberately tended to. Not only do you have to say I am curious about you to someone who might be a friend, but you should also invest in that curiosity — setting aside time and energy for your friendship to grow and deepen, privileging it ahead of the things that will pile up and demand your attention in ways that friendship seldom does,” she writes. “Your friends become your ecosystem. When you make them, you are putting more daisies in your life. You are putting more birds in the trees.”
“What does it mean to be comfortably afraid?” Obama asks in The Light We Carry. “For me, the idea is simple. It’s about learning to deal wisely with fear, finding a way to let your nerves guide you rather than stop you.”
Of course, embracing your fears and learning from them is easier said than done — even if you’re as well-practiced as the former First Lady. In her book, Obama describes her own fears as often paralyzing, and says fear in general is “psychologically potent.” She’s also well familiar with anxiety — fear’s slightly more diffuse bestie, according to her — and recalls that the most anxious she’s ever been in her life was when Barack told her for the first time he wanted to run for president.
“I found the prospect of it actually terrifying,” she writes. “I understood that Barack wanted to be president. I was certain he’d make a great president. But at the same time, I myself didn’t like political life. I liked my job. I was bent on providing Sasha and Malia with a settled and quiet life. I was not a fan of disruption and unpredictability, and I knew a campaign would bring heaps of it. I knew, too, that we’d be opening ourselves up to judgment. A lot of judgment. You run for president and you are basically asking every American to either approve or disapprove of you with their vote. Let me tell you, that felt scary.”
While simply telling him “no” would have been a relief, Obama instead decided to ask herself why she was actually afraid — or, more specifically, what she was so afraid of. It was then that she had a massive realization: She wasn’t afraid of Barack actually being president, she was scared of all the change and newness that would happen if he was.
Change, newness and all the uncertainty that comes with it is what’s at the core of fear. Whether it’s the first day of school, taking a new job, moving across the country to be with a partner or anything else that can shake up your life and expose you to new feelings and experiences is, to put it bluntly, scary as hell. But that doesn’t mean you should avoid it. In fact, Obama says, you should try to get to know that fear even better — and while you’re struggling with that fear, self-doubt and uncertainty, remember to be kind to yourself in the process.
Kick-start your spark:
Think about a situation in your life that scares you. Consider how it feels in your body, as well as how it sets your mind into a spiral. According to Obama, that fear is actually a self-protecting impulse, the same set of instincts you knew as a kid. (Who among us hasn’t sobbed in line waiting for their first roller coaster, or run to their parents’ room screaming during a thunderstorm?) The fear you experience now is the grown-up version of that fear — and much of the time it’s stronger, more cunning and wants to send you off screaming. Instead of turning to run, greet that fear head-on. Acknowledge the familiarity of that feeling, and get to know it. How does embracing that part of yourself loosen fear’s grip? How does simply acknowledging that the anxiety you’re feeling is rooted in fear help you step back from it?
Extra shine from Michelle:
“How will you meet your soulmate if you don’t go on that date?” she asks. “How will you get ahead if you don’t take that new job, or move to a new city? How will you learn and grow if fear stops you from leaving home to go to college? Or from stepping forward into a room full of new people, or traveling to a new country, or befriending someone whose skin color is different from yours? The unknown is where possibility glitters. If you don’t take the risk, if you don’t ride out a few jolts, you are taking away your opportunities to transform. Can I afford to make my world a little bigger? I believe the answer is almost always yes.”
To learn more about how to find your light, watch The Light We Carry on Netflix.
