“Now is not the time.”

When the streets outside your door are neck deep in water and the call log on your phone shows repeated calls to family trying to find out if they made, the instinct is to wait out the storm.

But if not now, then when?

Today, after two weeks of urban flooding, in a country seeing the worst rains in half a century with two million evacuated, I finally held my Movers Workshop on youth political participation.

Not in the room I’d planned, not with the chairs I’d arranged, but online, faces flickering through weak signals and interrupted electricity. And yet, people still showed up. They showed up ready to listen, ready to argue, ready to find a way to put an end to the storm.

"Empowering" doesn't do it justice, not because it went perfectly, but because it happened at all. Because in times when our country is literally underwater, the youth still find ways to reach for each other, to build spaces of dialogue, to imagine futures where our voices don’t just echo but matter.

I will sleep knowing that if even one person from today’s session takes the torch forward —hosts their own, sparks their own conversations— then the chain reaction has already begun. That’s the kind of resilience no flood can wash away.

So here’s to showing up, even when the world tells you it’s easier not to.

And here’s to resilience, solidarity, and the stubbornness only found in the survivors of the storm.