Perhaps for you, like me, the stomach knot you expected to loosen on Election Day has tightened instead. Perhaps pre-election anxiety has become post-election dread for you, as it has for me. What should folks like you and me do?

I was a passive consumer of the election. I read the news. I listened. I commiserated with the like-minded. I ask myself now: What did this accomplish? Of course I voted, and I sent money here and there, but this is not real participation. The election acted on me more than I acted on it.

Politics is not supposed to be that way. It should be about interaction and exchange of ideas. I can’t be a bystander any more. Just the thought of doing something, even small acts in the face of overwhelming forces, even mere drops in the ocean, somehow begins to loosen the knot in my stomach. I think this has something to do with the way we humans are wired. We are meant to act, to do.

So what does this “doing” look like for me? I don’t know, but I have some ideas. For starters, I am writing an opinion piece in which I confess to my former passivity and ask my question. I do this with awareness of and respect for the many islanders who have long been “doing” politically in countless courageous and compassionate ways. I look up to them.

I plan to continue to listen and read, but from now on with an orientation of asking how the things I am learning can be acted on. There are two areas in particular where I want to make a contribution: climate change and immigration.

Our likely future Environmental Protection Agency director is a man who currently leads a coal industry-funded climate change denial lobbying group (a knot tightening sentence if there ever was one). I accept the scientific consensus about the causes and disastrous results of climate change, and I am as educated on the issue as the average progressive, but I can do more. I can study the arguments of the deniers and learn how they stack up against the science. I can advocate, including drafting letters for my sister to send to her moderate Republican congressman to engaging in activities that educate and raise awareness.

I can act locally, encouraging my neighbors who drive five minutes to the store for a single bag of groceries to try walking or biking from time to time. I suspect that our climate solution will need to be personal as well as political.

Our neighbors who are recent immigrants are facing a fearful, uncertain future. I will wear the safety pin, and I will march for the cause of a just immigration policy. But this is not enough. There is disconcerting news from our own schools about our children being subjected to taunts and hurtful remarks. I will look for more direct ways to support my neighbors and to create a safe and welcoming environment for them on the island we share.

How will I find time for this new level of engagement? For one thing, I will stop reading content-free political analyses that treat elections like horse races. I look back with regret on the time I wasted obsessing over polls, meta-polls and analysis of polls, time wasted reading about political strategies, about which candidate is doing better with which group. This type of news has its place, but productive political conversations should be about positions and not positioning. I will study issues and learn about how to influence outcomes.

I sympathize with the many different reactions of my neighbors to the troubling outcome: anger, reflection, retreat, desire to understand and empathize, desire to create healing. Emotions and thoughts have their time and place, but I believe humans are at their best when they have a sense of purpose and they find ways to act on it. For my knot and for our future, it is time to act.

— Tim Morrison is an islander.