A young organizer once asked Rosa a question most of us have asked ourselves in some form. She was two years into the work and already exhausted. She wanted to know how Rosa had kept going for fifty years.
Rosa had earned the right to answer with a victory lap. She marched in the civil rights movement of the sixties. She stood against the war in Vietnam. She fought for women's equality in the seventies, against Reagan in the eighties, and for LGBTQ+ rights through the nineties and beyond.
Instead she said, "I stopped expecting to win in my lifetime."
The young organizer asked what you would ask. "Then why keep fighting?"
Here is the answer, from Chapter Sixteen of Staying Strong in Unsteady Times: "Because I'm not fighting for my lifetime. I'm fighting for my grandchildren's lifetime, for their grandchildren. I'm part of a relay race, not a sprint. My job is to carry the baton as far as I can and hand it off stronger than I received it."
Read that twice. It is not resignation. It is a change in what the work is for.
Psychologists have a word for it. Erik Erikson called it generativity. He believed the central task of adulthood is to care about the people who come after you, to guide them and make something for them that outlasts you. The opposite, he said, is stagnation: a life that turns inward and slowly goes flat.
Here is why this matters when you are tired. If your worth is tied to the outcome, every setback feels like a verdict on you. If your work is a handoff, a setback is a hard leg of the race. The outcome still matters. You just stop renting your whole sense of self to it.
This is not only for activists. It fits the person caring for a parent who will not get better, the teacher in a hard year, the worker who has put years into something that may not finish on their watch. Anyone who has ever asked, "What is the point if I won't see it through?"
I am seventy-six. I volunteered for Robert Kennedy's campaign in 1968 and met him about three weeks before he died. I know what it is to hope for an outcome and not get it. In twenty-two years of coaching, I came to believe that one of the kindest things you can offer a tired person is permission to stop counting wins.
The book borrows a line from Havel for this: hope is the ability to work for something because it is good, not because it stands a chance of succeeding. Rosa lives that. She still gets discouraged. She says so. But discouragement is a feeling, and it comes and goes.
So here is a small question for today. Who comes after you in the thing you care about? A child, a neighbor, a younger coworker, a stranger you will never meet. What is one thing you could hand them a little stronger than you received it?
Read the first chapter of Staying Strong in Unsteady Times free