For months, I’ve struggled to feel inspired. I looked to art, performance, and philosophy, but all stranded me in the distance between idea and action.

Last night, I felt inspired. Watching the scrum of Columbia students in all black, maneuvering their way to their target, and taking the building, I saw the space between idea and action disappear. I marched around the encampment with other supporters. Each time we circled the campus, I saw the crowd around Hinds Hall grow, the chants louder, the flash of cameras brighter. From the ground, you could see the lights going up on each floor as the group ascended the building. Banners fell from higher stories greeted by crowds and chants from below. An ecstatic unity rung out across Columbia’s campus.

What is this inspiration I feel? First and foremost, I encounter the reverberations of the inspiration the students take from the Palestinian. The bravery of the actions at Columbia pales in comparison to the decades of endurance and strength of the Palestinian people. In the face of genocide, Palestinians refuse to abandon their right to their homeland. This is the root of inspiration.

Second, I am inspired by how students understand solidarity as the work of collapsing contradictions. The protests, encampment, and occupation identify the University’s complicity within the genocide through their investments in Israel. As members of the University, the students overcome their complicity through staging a confrontation between the values of liberal education (inclusiveness, dissent, social justice) and the material actions of the University. In risking suspension, expulsion, and arrest, they assert that they would rather abandon the life they’ve build for themselves than endure the status quo.

I am inspired by students’ understanding that political change requires sacrifice. To radically shift the world, we will have to abandon the lives we have envisioned for ourselves.

This is a struggle I have had with art lately. Many artists endeavor to change the world through their art, but, in the process, cling to the status of art and the life that it affords. We artists ascribe political value to our art as a substitute for confronting the social and political forces structuring contemporary immiseration. We confront politics purely as aesthetics, thinking producing the most righteous or beautiful work will shift social conditions. In doing so, we fail to confront the contradictions structuring the art world, our music scenes, our social life. We cling to comfort. We refuse the risk of living another life.

Inspiration is the kernel of personal growth. It illuminates another pathway forward. Reflecting on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze notes, “Critique is not a reaction of re-sentiment but the active expression of an active mode of existence; attack and not revenge, the natural aggression of a way of being, the divine wickedness without which perfection could not be imagined.” To live differently is to embody a critique of what already exists, to be struck by a “divine wickedness” beckoning a different life.

“In our lives are present a multitude of phenomena, just as we ourselves are present in many different phenomena. We are life, and life is limitless. Perhaps one can say that we are only alive when we live the life of the world, and so live the sufferings and joys of others. The suffering of others is our own suffering, and the happiness of others is our own happiness”

Thich Nhat Hanh