Fire Ants Ain't ALL Bad (Love Gets Organized)

I need to confess something, and the people who know me well are going to nod a little too hard.

I was not a team player.

My sports growing up were wrestling and combat sports. And you know why I loved them? Because it was just me. One opponent, one mat, one ref, nobody else to blame. If I won, that was mine. If I lost, also mine. No teammate dropping the ball. No coach benching me for somebody's nephew. Just me and whatever I brought that day. (The only team sport I ever truly respected was tag team pro wrestling, and honestly that was about the outfits.)

That wiring followed me everywhere. School group projects? I did the whole thing, let everybody put their name on it, and then quietly resented all of them. Fun for everyone! In business I wanted to run the thing. In caregiving, I started communities and wanted to be holding every single thread. I preferred working alone, and I REALLY preferred being in charge. Partly because I am good at some things. Mostly because if I am in charge, nobody can let me down.

You can probably see where this is going.

Doing everything yourself works beautifully, right up to the moment it stops working all at once. I will spare you the full highlight reel. But carrying everything alone for that long cost me. Relationships. Joy. And a real chunk of my health. My body has a long memory and it brings that era up regularly, usually at the least convenient times. Which turns out to be a strange kind of gift. Nothing teaches you about your limits quite like your own body refusing to cooperate with your ego. And here is the funny part. The sports I loved had the lesson built right into them, and I missed it for decades.

In grappling there is this thing called tapping out. When you are caught in a hold you cannot escape, you tap your opponent or the mat, and everything stops. No shame in it. Every serious fighter taps. Constantly. Especially in practice. And the folks who refuse to tap? They get hurt. Torn ligaments, wrecked shoulders, months off the mat. Meanwhile the people who tap early and often are still training ten years later.

Tapping is how you get to come back tomorrow.

I spent most of my life refusing to tap. And collaboration, it turns out, is learning to. Admitting what you cannot carry, so you are still around to do the part that is actually yours.

This is the movement of the rhythm I find most exciting. Also the most humbling, for reasons that should be obvious by now. When the Good Samaritan Initiative started, the old Sam move would have been to launch our own meal program. Our name on the sign, our way of doing everything. Instead, we noticed churches in Central City were already caring for unhoused neighbors, and doing it well. So we joined them. Less glory. Way more impact. Same story with the Greater New Orleans Interfaith Association. Churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, all caring for the same city, mostly in separate silos. When folks stop working side by side and start working together, everybody's reach gets longer. We have even made it official in our strategy: we want to be a connector and a bridge, and we are deliberately staying out of the catch all business. The wisdom we are continuing to discover is...

Love multiplies when nobody has to carry the whole thing alone.

I would love to tell you I am cured. I am not. But here is what I am actually practicing these days, with mixed results, to lean into collaboration instead of away from it.

I ask "who is already doing this?" before I start anything. Then I call them. The Good Samaritan Initiative is basically what happens when I remember to do this. The times I forget are the times I end up building something nobody needed.

I bring my thing and let go of the rest. I am not good at everything. (Shocking news to some of you, I know... but mostly to my ego.) So I am trying to figure out what I actually bring, and trust other people with what they bring. Even when I could technically do their part. ESPECIALLY then.

I let somebody else get the credit. It stings a little every time. Then it feels weirdly free.

I say what I need out loud. This one is the hardest for me. For decades I quietly carried things I never asked anyone to help with, and then wondered why I was so tired. I am getting better at it. Slowly. Badly at first.

If you are wired like me, feel free to steal any of these.

I wish this was a new insight... but this one is older than all of us...and then some. In Christian circles, Paul told some squabbling early Christians that no part of a body gets to say "I do not need you." And Rabbi Tarfon, in the old Jewish collection of teachings called Pirkei Avot, put it in a way I come back to constantly: you are not obligated to finish the work, but you are not free to walk away from it either. Which takes a lot of pressure off, honestly. Nobody was ever supposed to finish it alone.

Nature figured this out long before any of us even had the words to describe it. Ants especially, which is a sentence I never expected to write on a spiritual blog. Here is the wild part: there is no boss ant. The queen mostly lays eggs. Nobody is giving orders. And yet they farm, build, haul a hundred times their own weight, and move as one. Then there are the fire ants right here in Louisiana. When the floods come, they link their bodies together into living rafts and float until the water goes down. Not one of them survives that alone. Thousands survive it together.  (Fun fact, a book of wisdom called Proverbs tells lazy people to go consider the ant. I would like to add a footnote: control freaks too. I still hate fire ants. But I respect them now.)

This week...

Pick ONE thing you have been carrying by yourself. A project, a responsibility, a worry. Ask one person to carry a piece of it. Just a piece.

Extra credit for my fellow recovering control freaks: let somebody do something their way this week. Do not correct it. Do not quietly redo it after they leave. (I see you. I AM you.)

Of course, collaboration has its own ways of going sideways. Lots of meetings, lots of good intentions, nothing actually happening. Or partnerships where one group does all the work while the other one gets the press release. So next post is "Beyond Good Intentions." What it actually takes to collaborate well: humility, clarity, shared power, and not duplicating what somebody else is already doing better than you.

Until then, may you tap out before something tears, may you find good people to carry it with, and may you walk the way of the ant... but don't step on any!

Wishing you grace, peace, and every good...

Sam