I’ve never been much of a rebel, though I admire those who are. Sure, back in the day I rolled the waistband of my skirt until my hemline defied junior high regulations, carefully ripped my jeans (before you could buy them that way) and shouted, “No more guns, no more war, U.S. out of El Salvador,” returning to my cozy apartment after a half day’s protest. But mostly, I follow the rules.

As I write this, I’m returning from travel to Spain where I witnessed small acts of active and passive rebellion. First, there were the cloistered nuns in the old town in Madrid who’ve chosen to isolate themselves from the world and who sell sweets and confections through a turnstile, never showing their faces. There were the patriots in Pamplona, staging one of their regular marches to demand freedom for the prisoners of the Basque independence movement. And the group of teenaged girls who, delighted by the buskers playing jazz on the wide sidewalk, danced with abandon until a local, devout man tried to break it up, shouting that their act was a shame on Palm Sunday. The musicians and teens paused for a brief moment, then resumed in full force, accompanied in their exuberance by passers by.

All rebels in their own way and to different degrees.

My traveling companion insists on visiting every museum within miles of our hotel. We visited the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, and the Prado, the Royal Palace, and the Thyssen Bornemisa in Madrid (I refused a visit to the Museum of Pork). For the most part I enjoyed viewing fine works of art, from medieval to modern. Most of the painters and sculptors represented were men, a result of entrenched forces in the societies in which the art was made. In my irritation and sadness at this fact I staged a small act of viewer’s rebellion—whenever I encountered a work of art by a woman, regardless of whether or not I liked it, I stood firmly in front of the piece for a full minute. As happens at art museums, when one person seems to take an interest in something, several other people are compelled to stop as well. Little did Artemisia Gentileschi know that in March of 2013, an American woman, (America?) a French student, two Algerian men and a small, elderly Spaniard would stand in front of her painting in awe of the determined look on the dimly lit face of naked Susana resisting the Elders. A small act, a quiet act, but rebellion all the same.

Whether to shake up the status quo, resist injustice, or simply to prompt change, maybe we all ought to charge ourselves with performing little rebellions—resist a rule or two, stick up for the unfortunate among us, dance more, sing full-voiced and with abandon.