I live alone in an abode that is literally being built beneath me as my renovations to home (and life) continue, the sound of jackhammering beneath my feet shaking the floorboards while my dogs cower under my desk chair (my big dog is afraid of the vacuum, and the ongoing drilling).

When I bought this house, I actually included lines from the poem below to the realtor to share with the sellers, naming that I was seeking my “House of Belonging,” which my ex-husband David Whyte wrote.² (I did think it a wonderful irony to use a poem to invite my new house in after the divorce that left me exiled from the home on Whidbey I loved, but I love delicious ironies and the words were exactly right, which is the gift of David’s poetry that I have decided to keep.)

And I thought
this is the good day
you could
meet your love,
this is the gray day
someone close
to you could die.

This is the day
you realize
how easily the thread
is broken
between this world
and the next

….

This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.

This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.

This home I’m building is the place I want to ask my friends to come, and love all the things it has taken me awhile to learn to love, and to belong to my own aloneness.

And I had a gray day recently, in finding out my friend Jim Pitkow died. I still find it such an odd life that you can wake up on a perfectly “ordinary” morning, and news travels through the wires and arrives on your phone, and something of the universe then suddenly seems profoundly off kilter. So I’ve been thinking on him of late, of the complex and beautiful human he was, and one of the things I wondered about was a sense I sometimes got around him of his loneliness, and about the distinctions between aloneness and loneliness.

Loneliness is a strange thing, so universal, so heartbreaking, so aching. I remember years ago lying in bed, looking out of the window at the night sky with a wild loneliness and being hit with this sense of a keening, howling sense of isolation…which then oddly brought me into deep kinship through time with all those who had ever looked up at the night sky feeling alone. My loneliness, it turned out, was one of the most deeply human things I could be feeling.

It seems like many are trying to solve, run from, break, defend against their own sense of aloneness and isolation. Many may not know how. And sometimes it’s more alive in a life (or in a night) than at other times, when the crowdedness slips away and you’re left with your own thoughts and the fears that we can keep in abeyance during the day surface.

It’s so easy to not feel met, and I’ve also learned you can feel very alone in a crowd, or in a marriage, and that’s the particular kind of aloneness that isn’t about not having company but about not feeling seen in a particular way. My friend and colleague Jennifer Garvey Berger once asked me what it was like being seen through small windows while I was Wikipedia’s CHRO, which I’ll speak to later, but the question stirred up a lot in me — certainly it’s been over a dozen years since she asked me that and I’m still sitting with it.

Loneliness = Aloneness + Not Being Seen. Change either term, and the loneliness changes. And the company you keep matters, because the cure is not more bodies.

The Artistry of Aloneness

I was thinking about my earlier post about having a broken reach — what happens when someone doesn’t trust that when they reach out to someone, it will be returned. Aloneness is a weird perverse inversion of the broken reach, because in a sense, being good company for oneself in isolation is a particular reach towards oneself and finding there a sense of being internally met rather than a sense of wanting. It’s the inward face of the reach function. Instead of a false “no one needs anything over here,” it is more a flavor of “no one more is needed here,” which leaves all the room for the wanting or not wanting with none of the frantic urgency of the needing.

Aloneness is oddly learned relationally as well — the child able to be absorbed in play while the mother simply exists nearby, not needing anything.³

I’ve been obsessed with the writings of Hannah Arendt in this time, and of solitude, she wrote, I am “by myself, together with my self, and therefore two-in-one, whereas in loneliness I am actually one, deserted by all others.”⁴ This is such a fabulous articulation of the difference between aloneness and loneliness, and there is such a sense of desolation in “deserted by all others” — including, and this is the ache of it, by yourself. The broken inward reach means not being able to find yourself home.

Being alone is a neutral fact in and of itself. What transforms the sense of it is entirely internal — the perception of it, what meaning you make of it, the fit between the social life you have and the one you need. I’ve learned to luxuriate in chosen aloneness. I once took myself to Prince Edward Island, Canada, with my film camera to wander the lands of Anne of Green Gables, spending unhurried hours setting up a single shot of a lighthouse in late afternoon light, walking the “haunted wood” after dark when all the tourists had gone — nobody’s schedule but my own, nobody’s tempo, whatever meal I desired, and then to bed at whatever hour pleased me, because that too is part of it all.

And we do actually need solitude. Research says that roughly fifteen minutes of solitude can turn the volume down on high-arousal emotion — the anxious and the excited alike — settling us toward calm.⁵ Solitude does something company cannot, namely, down-regulation. (I’ll also note that company does something solitude cannot, which is co-regulation, and both are important in a life.)

The thing that makes a difference here is choice. If one chooses solitude, it has the possibility and promise of restoration. Unwanted aloneness harms. So the capacity to be with the company you keep in the empty moments is the capacity to choose anew an aloneness that one didn’t necessarily select. When I’m wandering around my house on an empty night, can I choose it? And there are so many ways to not choose it. I didn’t choose my last divorce, and I think of the forced, unchosen isolation of many — especially as I watch my parents’ generation lose their friends to old age, and, from my friend Jim’s death, I am not exempt from these losses.

I used to think my grandmother had the best set up. My grandfather retired early, and when she became a widow, she still lived in an apartment building with two of her sisters who were also widows. The three of them would sit on the couch when I visited, and comment in Chinese about my weight. Such a cultural moment. The beer steins that sat on her cabinets (she never drank beer) for literally four decades were silent witness to this. Apparently my grandfather was a trader, and business associates would bring him these large German beer steins, which were such an oddity. But during COVID, both of her sisters passed away, and she lives there alone now, still in the one-bedroom with the beer steins that she’s occupied since the 1980s.

I finished a draft of my chaplaincy thesis a few evenings ago, pending a couple of last interviews, and was feeling particularly alone in not having anyone to celebrate that with. I could have called friends, but I chose instead to keep the company I’ve been writing about. I walked my dogs in the twilight, I ran a bath, I lit a candle, I admired the way candlelight casts shadows, I said a prayer for the dead and for the living, I sang Broadway musicals in an empty house, and then I tucked myself in bed with a good book.

That evening was years in the making. What has it taken me to like the company I keep in the empty moments? Sitting meditation is certainly one. The small putterings of movement and ritual. Acts of creation. Reading poetry and other things that move me. And even the experience of loneliness itself. When I first divorced, I ended up living with my parents for close to a year, and I would fantasize about making tea in my own kitchen and carrying it to my living room with a book. I’m right now just so pleased to be living that simple fantasy out. (What does not work is doomscrolling, some interim level of it is fine but it actually shorts your capacity to disengage from it beyond where it feels hollow and that’s where it actually contributes to a sense of loneliness. The doomscrolling isn’t solitude and it isn’t company. The inner dialogue goes silent so you are not even with yourself, hence the hollowness, creating the precondition of the loneliness it is trying to distract you from.)⁶

Emily Dickinson wrote,⁷

There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself —
Finite infinity.

A soul admitted to itself is the ability to keep one’s own company in the empty moments, and there’s a strange sort of beauty in the way reading her loneliness eases mine. This is the lovely paradox the poet Christian Wiman names — that “a poem of great loneliness can bring us great consolation,” and more than consolation, solidarity, kinship, something that eases the original loneliness itself.⁸ Pádraig Ó Tuama, writing about those lines, added that no poem of loneliness is easy to write, but that the writing makes a certain solidarity possible — with yourself first, and then with whoever might read it later. Solidarity with yourself, which is liking the company you keep in the empty moments. And it is, I suppose, what I am doing here — writing the lonely thing, trusting that somewhere a reader holds it and that there is then a kinship between us shimmering and unseen that does its own quiet work.

The Aloneness Within Intimacy

I’ve also had the aloneness you can feel in a crowd. As I’ve gotten to reestablish myself in San Francisco, I’ve found myself in rooms where I don’t really know anyone well. There’s the kind of loneliness where you don’t have a group or network, and an emotional loneliness where there isn’t a close bond that actually reaches you. I sometimes feel like the latter can be even worse — the acute loneliness that comes from being in a relationship but in one that feels emotionally barren.⁹

Two of my favorite writers have written about particular solitudes that border one another. Rilke, in his letters to a young poet, described the highest task of love as the guarding of another’s solitude — two solitudes that “protect and border and salute each other.”¹⁰ And Gibran, in his lines on marriage, asked for spaces in togetherness — “the pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”¹¹ The mature aim was never the fusion that abolishes aloneness. It was aloneness held adjacently in witness and accompaniment, where the roots are separate but entwined, “not one, not two.” I think when I was younger, I wanted the passion of fusion and merging, the surety of it, the bulwark of it, without realizing what I might be giving up in order to have it.

I recently had a date with someone who was a bit too willing to give up who he was for the idea of who I am. I found myself trying to make myself visible through his projection fields, and saying to him, “You know, I do think I’m great, but not as great as you think I am!” with some bemused dismay. There needs to be an inherently strong sense of self, enough robustness of ego, so that I don’t have to shrink or fit myself in order to be in relationship. (Also, I’ve discovered that I am uninterested in being the more interesting part of a dyad.) This happens in leadership too, the particular oddness of moving through people’s fields of projections of you, their needs of you, and all the ways we get to work with disappointing others.

The Aloneness of Leadership

I’ve worked with any number of organizational and movement leaders who speak about loneliness as a leader, and the key differentiation is that this one is structural rather than trait-based. Trait loneliness comes out of having the broken reach function I wrote about earlier; state loneliness is produced by the role and title — situational, but no less real. There are three variations of this one.

The Loneliness of Role Asymmetry

The first is the asymmetry of the role. Leaders move through those fields of projection all day — people’s needs of them, ideas of them, disappointments in them — and the role actively inhibits the formation of friendships. I’ve often said that the capacity to be friends in an organization is directly proportional to the ability to have difficult conversations. At the exec level, leaders lack peers, and the dynamics run one direction. The leader is, by the very nature of the role, the professional meeter of other people's reaches — that is much of what good leadership is. But the reaching rarely runs the other way. People reach toward leaders all day, with requests, needs, hopes, grievances — and almost no one reaches for them with something like an unprompted how-are-you-really, the kind of care with no ask attached. Partly it's the pedestal assumption, that the person holding everyone else must not need holding. Partly nobody wants to presume. So a leader can end the day buried in reaches, not one of which was for her — which may be the loneliest form of crowd there is.

Part of the thing about being a leader has to do with the peculiar dynamics of visibility. I coached a good friend who was stepping into a CEO role, and this was a woman who was mission driven and aligned and knew she was smart and could contribute a lot, but took up the role because of the mission, not because of her own ego and need to be seen as a CEO. Part of preparing her was about how to work with the visibility rather than resist it. Some people call this branding. I’m a pragmatist — if people are going to see you through small windows as is their wont, at least make sure the furniture represents who and what you are. You really have no idea what people make up about you, but you can at least decide that the visible desk is a Davenport rather than a mid-century modern.

People are talking about you and making assumptions about you all the time, inferring what you might want. I have a habit of speaking aloud as a way of processing and I remember thinking that we needed a particular table in an area, really just musing about it (which if you know me, I do quite a lot of musing), and before I knew it, there was a table there. I had to teach people around me (and also modify my own signaling) to check with me. I once heard my admin who was going out on maternity leave explaining some of my behaviors to her interim replacement while I was around the corner, which was hysterical. “Gayle likes to walk around the floor at this time, because that way she’s accessible to people.” Really, I just can’t sit still for too long. There’s a particular amusement, and underneath it a particular aloneness, in overhearing the version of you that other people are working from. (I will note that I adored this admin, because in so many ways she was utterly brilliant and did see me and there was a lot of love between us.)

The Loneliness of Holding a Future Fate

The second is holding what can’t be shared. Every chief people officer knows this — what it is to know the fate of an organization and of people’s lives and be unable to share it for timing reasons, confidentiality reasons, legal reasons, all perfectly good reasons that require the maturity to know when to sit on things and who to confide in.

I spent years as Wikipedia’s CHRO, and the role necessitates being the professional holder of secrets. There’s a peculiar cost when you encounter someone in the elevator and know that their tenure is limited because of performance reasons, when you look out at a sea of people during an all-hands and know that there’s a reorg coming, and you live weeks ahead of everyone around you, which puts you in a weird temporal bubble. The role requires attention and presence and warmth, to be a face people turn towards, and yet holds this particular asymmetry. Plus, I’ve often called the role the liver function of the organization, where the job is to actively metabolize what is toxic and not working through the body, disseminated into actions, practices, policies, and rituals that evolve the organization towards coherence and integrity.

One of the foremost witnessers I know is my friend Christie Lynk, who is probably the best grandmother figure I know. “Omo” to her grandchildren, she is a nature creature who puts her children in touch with the natural world, is a source of open wonder and love to them and vice versa, and demonstrates to her students and her friends and her children and grandchildren this extraordinary thing she practices – mutual witness – which takes three turns. “I see you,” “You see that I see you,” and “I see that you see that I see you.” And for her to be so fully present with her grandchildren also requires in some sense, as she related to me, her awareness that she has finite time with them, that she will one day no longer be physically available to them as she is now. She holds her own fate, her finiteness, for her small grandchildren because they don’t yet, can’t yet, imagine a world without her. A good CHRO holds the organization’s futures in a similar way. This is the loneliness of foreknowledge, and it has to be lived out through acts of care.

The Loneliness of Development

The third is developmental loneliness. I’ve learned that I value people who have a sense of their own interiority — interiority meeting interiority allows for a fullness of meeting, the complexity of who I am met by the complexity of who they are. My exteriority meeting someone’s exteriority alone is its own kind of loneliness. I go back to this Adrienne Rich line I’ve loved again and again, about an honorable relationship as a process of “refining the truths they can tell each other.”¹²

It’s the loneliness of someone whose meaning-making structure, the way they look out onto the world, feels unmet because it’s statistically rare. I still remember Susanne Cook-Greuter telling me I needed other people like me, and she hauled me over in the midst of this conference we were at to introduce me to David McCallum and Aliki Nicolaides, who are still some of my dearest friends to this day. I’m forever grateful for that move breaking that particular sense of isolation.

It’s the aloneness of people who can hold complexity. I remember in the midst of a divorce finding that I could only really tolerate people around me who could hold me in both my okay-ness and my not-okayness, because to relate to me as wholly okay ignored the part of me that was wounded, and to relate to me as wounded ignored the part of me that was also fundamentally okay.

The Strange Things We Do

People do strange things to alleviate their fundamental loneliness, which nets a sort of odd proximity without exposure. They accept the unacceptable for a false sense of belonging, tolerate others and othering for false intimacy, stay in the lonely relationship far too long.

One category is company without contact. Apparently there’s a whole phenomenon of “study with me” YouTube videos, where you can study alongside a stranger on camera, hours of Twitch streams running, daily grocery shopping for the contact point of the staffed check-out. This runs near to purchased contact — the haircut or massage booked too often, barbers and nail techs and bartenders as stand-ins for therapists and friends, finding odd ways to become memorable like tipping large amounts. And then there are the ways that we contort ourselves — staying in the relationship or situationship far too long, an affair where someone else’s loneliness is partly a solution to yours, the friend group or group chat you can’t escape but that shrinks you or diminishes you, the church whose doctrine you don’t believe in that holds all the social leverage and actively threatens isolation for misalignment. (I’ve known quite a few people who have belonged to cults, and the particular loneliness of a person who is part of a cult and no longer believes in it is quite harrowing.)

And sometimes all the bids for attention. The vaguebook post — "some people just don't appreciate loyalty…" — that waits for someone to ask what's wrong. The story posted mostly to check who watched it. The oversharing with a stranger on an airplane, an intimacy made possible because they will never see you again, where the safety of a stranger is the enabler. The trolls arguing with strangers online because conflict is contact and negative attention is still attention, and I saw plenty of that during my Wikipedia years — there is always someone wrong on the internet. And the manufactured crises, the ways people wield illness. Indispensability, the compulsive giving — which is one I know personally.

And the reach towards artificial intelligence is a funny reach because it’s the reach function giving up on both directions at once — giving up on reaching outward because of fear that the reach may not be met, and giving up the reach to the interior self because of fear of meeting oneself — or maybe fear of not meeting oneself.

There’s a billboard in San Francisco as you drive into downtown, stark black letters on white background, that says “AI Dread? 1-231-HIT-US-UP.” Of course I called it out of sheer curiosity, and bizarrely, you could press different numbers for sounds of office life. Press ‘1’ for the sound of an office conflict, ‘2’ to hear someone talk about their date last night, ‘3’ for the sound of an office party. Like seriously, is this what we’ve come to? ‘7’ “returns you to a feeling of AI existential dread.” There may have been another point to this thing, but I missed it.

Loneliness & Totalitarianism

Conspiracies get people through the belonging of a fellowship of people “in the know,” which is part of where extremist movements get people because they provide a place in the world when all other places feel foreclosed.¹³ The seduction is real because the hunger is real.

Totalitarian regimes succeed because of what they offer the lonely — belonging, recognition, the feeling of being seen. Suleiman and I would talk about ISIS offering freedom from individual and collective shame. “Loneliness is the common ground of terror,” Arendt said, because in essence, ideology does for the lonely what they can no longer do for themselves — it supplies the conclusions and certainty and sense of belonging that their own silenced or diminished inner dialogue can’t offer them.

For activists, their work is against the very condition that the activist is most exposed to. It’s one of the strange absurdities that the very people fighting the machinery of totalitarianism that runs on loneliness can often be some of the most lonely people on the planet, because of who is looking to them and for what. So many activists who lead movements feel lonely because people are looking to them to be a certain thing, and that thing that others want does not wear vulnerability or uncertainty.

I think of an Iranian activist I worked with who worked for a large tech company by day and at night was developing online campaigns for women’s rights in Iran, getting flooded with videos from families of girls she was trying to help. There’s a terrifying kind of loneliness at her day job because of an inability to talk about what she does — having to pretend to be okay, pretend that she can focus on whatever technical project is at hand with stakes she cannot bring herself to actually care about, when she’d rather scream at her teammates that her people are dying, and instead is exhausted from the energy she invests in a facade of normalcy.

For activists and leaders, resiliency must include antidotes to loneliness, not just for themselves but as counter-totalitarian maintenance.

I was at a dinner with Rashad Robinson after the launch of his brilliant new book, From Presence to Power,¹⁴ and was struck by his speaking to how people mistake dialogue for negotiation, that some are so pleased to even have a seat at the table that they may be unaware of what they give up for it. Movements will accept presence without power — for visibility, for representation, for a seat at the table. The seat placates the hunger that should drive movements towards leverage. The lonely accept presence without real witness or accompaniment — they’ll take company, membership, ambient bodies — and this form of counterfeit placates the hunger that should actually drive people towards being fully seen. The cruelty of this particular counterfeit is that it is just barely sufficient, just good enough, taking the seeking energy without the delivery of what is actually needed. Movements soften their demands to keep a seat at the table (and opponents know this and use this), and the lonely diminish, edit, and contort themselves to keep a sense of membership (and this is also often used against them).

The answer to counterfeit belonging isn’t a better seat. I go back to what my friend Christie offers her students, her grandchildren, her friends — this capacity of mutual witness. “I see that you see that I see you.” That is what a real seat at a real table feels like.

Aloneness as the Foundation of Conscience

I go back to Harry holding the golden snitch to his lips at the end of everything — the one that stayed sealed the entire story — whispering "I open at the close." And what opens is accompaniment, everyone who ever loved him, gathered to walk beside him toward the one ending he most has to face. But here is the thing — the company walks beside him, and the walk is still his. No one can take a single step of it for him. Accompanied and alone, both true at once, all the way into the forest. The risking of aloneness is its own unguaranteed bet. This is why I love Machado’s lines so much, “you walker, you make the road by walking.”¹⁵

This capacity to be alone is also the foundation of conscience. Arendt understood thinking itself as a dialogue — me and myself, conversing, weighing, imagining how the world looks from where someone else stands. The two-in-one is not a metaphor. It is what thought is. Which is why loneliness is so much more than sad — the lonely person loses the interior partner in that conversation, and with it the capacity to weigh, to judge, hold kindness towards oneself, and to dissent. What Arendt feared was not sadness but superfluousness — the person who, unable to think with themselves, will accept being thought for.

And for Arendt, even the two-in-one needs other people. The solitary thinker depends on trusted companions to make her one again — to confirm, by knowing her, that the two who converse in the dark are a single person after all. Even solitude is on loan from Indra’s net; one never graduates from being held. With Machado, yes, you make the road by walking, but you were never the only one on the road — to think that is delusion.

Rilke has lines I have quoted before and will quote again, because words you say as prayer are meant for repeating — “I am too alone in the world, yet not alone enough / to make each hour holy.”¹⁶ Too alone, yet not alone enough. He is naming the between-place — not yet deserted, not yet two-in-one — which is, if I’m honest, where most of us live most of the time.

Making Places of Belonging

I’ve said since my Wikimedia years that those of us who know exile know how to make places of belonging for others. I know exile in a few registers — the immigrant child moving homes, the Philippines to New York to Los Angeles to Fresno to Santa Maria, and more recently from the home on Whidbey that I loved, because divorce sunders homes along with marriages. And here I am now, building a House of Belonging with room for others in it, guest rooms I dearly want my friends to occupy. Like many folks, I just watched Matt Damon play Odysseus in The Odyssey, and whatever the movie’s flaws, the oldest message in it holds: welcome the stranger — the one at your door, and the one within you.

I was a lonely kid — shy, terribly awkward, and gawky, with the trifecta of geekiness: glasses, braces, and acne. I was far more comfortable playing Dungeons and Dragons than playing team sports, and I find it fascinating that my job in life is creating places of belonging for others so they can experience their own unique selves and be witnessed and seen.

If loneliness is what seeds the ground for totalitarianism, then making places of belonging for others is the fundamentally anti-totalitarian work at scale, the maintenance of democracy through intimacy at the scale of the potluck, the commons, the dinner table, the invitation to be a part of something more than yourself. Those who can keep their own company cannot be sold the snake oil of those selling belonging to the abandoned and self-abandoned.

Jennifer’s question about small windows has stayed with me all these years, and I think I finally have the shape of an answer — what I’ve come to call “distributed witnessing,” the value of having people from many parts of your life with different lenses of you, able to see different parts of you, reflecting fractally back. No one window sees all of me. And different seeings evoke different parts of self — which may be the deeper wonder of being in relationship, that we are not just found by our witnesses but partly summoned by them.

And all of it — the mutual witness, the distributed witnessing, the being seen — first requires liking the company you keep in the empty moments, because you cannot let yourself be seen if you cannot bear what’s there to see. And going back to my friend Jim, I wondered if he got enough witnessing, because he was both very dear and also oddly slippery in some ways that I could never quite pin down, and I noticed that I wanted that seeing for him.

I think my favorite loneliness right now is sitting at my own kitchen table with the open door, keeping my own counsel and company and finding myself and my dogs enough, ready for whoever and whatever might come in.

NOTES

1. Oriah Mountain Dreamer, “The Invitation,” from The Invitation (HarperONE, 1999).

2. David Whyte, “The House of Belonging,” from The House of Belonging (Many Rivers Press, 1997).

3. The child at play in the presence of the undemanding mother is D.W. Winnicott’s image, from “The Capacity to Be Alone” (1958) — his argument that the capacity to be alone is developed, paradoxically, in the presence of another.

4. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, from the chapter “Ideology and Terror” (1958 edition). The “two-in-one” passage, and later in this essay, “loneliness is the common ground of terror” and the observation that such movements offer a place in the world to those for whom all other places have been foreclosed, are from the same chapter.

5. Thuy-vy Nguyen, Richard Ryan & Edward Deci, “Solitude as an Approach to Affective Self-Regulation,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2018) — on the deactivation effect of brief solitude and the role of choice in whether solitude restores or harms. The distinction between social loneliness (lacking a network) and emotional loneliness (lacking a bond that reaches you) is Robert Weiss, Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation (MIT Press, 1973).

6. The mechanism is what neuroscientists Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson identified as the dissociation of “wanting” and “liking” — two distinct neural circuits, one for seeking and one for satisfaction. Liking is what tells you to stop; distressing news never delivers the completion signal, so the wanting keeps running long after the liking has quit. See Berridge & Robinson on incentive-sensitization, American Psychologist (2016); Sharma et al., “The Dark at the End of the Tunnel: Doomscrolling on Social Media Newsfeeds,” Technology, Mind, and Behavior (2022); and Baughan et al., “’I Don’t Even Remember What I Read’: How Design Influences Dissociation on Social Media,” CHI 2022.

7. Emily Dickinson, “There is a solitude of space” (Franklin 1696).

8. Christian Wiman, speaking on the publication of The Dance (2026), quoted in Pádraig Ó Tuama’s newsletter, which also carries Ó Tuama’s reflection on the writing of lonely poems.

9. See Weiss, note 5.

10. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Letter 7, trans. M.D. Herter Norton (W.W. Norton, 1934).

11. Kahlil Gibran, “On Marriage,” The Prophet (Knopf, 1923).

12. Adrienne Rich, “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying” (1975).

13. Arendt, see note 4.

14. Rashad Robinson, From Presence to Power (2026).

15. Antonio Machado, “Proverbios y cantares XXIX,” Campos de Castilla (1912), rendered loosely here.

16. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours, I.13.

A teacher I had years ago once told me I had a broken reach function, which was a fascinating thing to contemplate, and of course began the inquiry and investigation into, first, “what the hell is that?” and second, “how does one fix such a thing?” We could go into attachment theory, which was a lively dinner discussion about how fascinating how few of us have secure attachment, but I’d rather go somewhere else in this exploration. For our purposes today, “a broken reach function” is that you don’t trust if you do an outward reach or tug or ask, that there will be something that meets it, so the impulse to reach to another human gets truncated or stymied into a fake kind of “I don’t need anything!” “No one needs anything over here!”

I was saying something to my mother about what I’ve learned from friendship through my divorces is that when life gets hard, and about who shows up and who doesn’t, and she interrupted to say, “They aren’t there for you like family.”

Going back to the signal fires on the watchtowers, they fascinate me because it is somewhat like the experience I’ve had in my own life, a learning that I’ve come to hard-won and all the more precious for it, that when I’ve lit a metaphorical signal fire (contrary to what my mother said), it’s resulted in a line of fires winking back over the curve of an earth where I can’t see the far horizon, but that long allies feel mustered whatever time of day or night to signal back. I care less for the mustering of arms than the way that flames in the night across miles signal friendship and a pact to come to one another’s aid.

But when I look back on these last decades, there were so many times I reached and wasn’t met.

Sometimes it was because I was clumsy, unskilled in the reaching, and it was a messy, muddled ask rather than a clean one that could be met. I remember once telling a teacher rather despairingly that I felt like such a mess. The reach was sideways or guised or hedged, so of course it couldn’t be met, and somehow that just reinforced this deep sense of being unable to be met. That was unfun. Nothing like self-fulfilling stories to keep an old belief that doesn’t serve me going. I wasn’t really taught to be able to cleanly express wants or needs – this isn’t what you can really have in independent immigrant families resolutely making their way in the world, and of course I also have a cultural background where things are implicit. (I remember trying to teach ex-husband No. 3 about wanting to go to the bathroom on roadtrips. I would start out by hinting that it might be nice to stop at a rest stop, and eventually having to escalate in both volume and amplitude to “I HAVE TO PEE NOW.” to which his response was, partly joking, “Well, why didn’t you say so?!”)

Sometimes reach wasn’t met because the other person wasn’t in a place to be reached to — too young and immature to see what I was wanting (especially when we were both young and unskilled), tapped out of their own capacity and under-resourced, maybe constrained in a way I couldn’t see or didn’t understand, constitutionally incapable of it, maybe their own reach function or receiving function wasn’t particularly well formed.

I remember falling in love a few decades back with someone whose sibling had just been diagnosed with a major illness, and their grief and a sense of guilt over their own perceived failure to be with her – and messily seeking their own escape – meant I felt alone in a dark place. It took me years to realize it wasn’t actually about me. And maybe if you reached and it wasn’t met, it wasn’t really about you either. I learned over time that so many of the reasons actually didn’t have to do with me.

I was lucky to have a teacher, Lynda Caesara, who pointed me at a therapist whose main task was to train a reach function. Literally I would make bids or requests and practice having them met, and sometimes not met, and training my nervous system to see what it could be like. Anyone who has ever tried to find a good therapist knows something of the vulnerability of the search – will they be the right person? How are they qualified? What hot mess are they that they got into the field in the first place? I went to graduate school with would-be therapists! The practice worked because there was a fallible human on the other end, someone who could fail to meet me and sometimes did. And it worked because his was a nervous system mine could template off of.

And then comes the second lesson, namely, the awful symmetry of what then to DO with a met reach, because a met reach then required receiving and then that was another hilariously awfully unpracticed mess. The reach, it turns out, is only half of the movement. The second half is the capacity to receive what comes back. And the thing about any sincere request, any true invitation, is that you don’t get to exactly dictate what the precise form is that you receive. You can influence it by the clarity of the request, but it actually requires another person, given their capacity, their body, their life experience, what they know how to give, to meet you however they can. (And some of the delight is being met by far more than you ever expected.)

I’ll share an older experience of reaching and being met though. When Toben (No. 2) and I decided to get divorced, it was a sunny afternoon — sort of obnoxiously sunny. We had a quirky, beautiful home together in Redwood City that we shared with my sister and our beloved roommate Adam, he who has been witness to so much in our lives. I remember calling our friends, and they came over. KimElisha came and sat with me while I sobbed on her shoulder on the front steps, and then she swapped with our friend Michelle to sit with Toben out in the backyard while Michelle came to the front steps to sit with me, each of our friends traversing our respective griefs as we began to come to terms with the dissolution of our marriage. One of the things I’m most proud of us is that neither of us ever made our friends choose, and one of the most delightful messages I got while I was celebrating the 250th anniversary of the US in Milan in an American bar was Toben sending me a photo celebrating with our beloved friends and my sister back in California. Just because we got divorced doesn’t mean I didn’t marry an amazing human being.

KimElisha and Michelle were the ones we reached for in that moment, and much is also asked of the person being reached for. Being reached for asks of you to check your own capacity to meet someone else. So often we want to give and not let someone down, and we overcommit. It asks of you to read a need accurately, even when the need is messily expressed, because the person reaching may not know how or be unskilled or ask for the safer thing when they really need something else, and in that case, there’s an opportunity to be a co-discoverer or co-inquirer. It asks of you to communicate well, because you may be a partial meet and that needs to be stated. Being reached for asks your consent, and your willingness to offer, and those are no small things, but they are beautiful.

That’s reaching, being met, and the thing about reaching is that it amplifies the capacity for reciprocity for both the reacher and the one being reached for, becoming a widening web. We think of divorce as personal, but it really is a community level event, a rend in the particular formation of our friend group and impacted beyond just us. I think of my friend Jack Saul’s profound work on collective trauma, such as post 9/11, and that collective grief requires collective addressing of it. We have privatized grief as a society, made individual what should be collective, collective trauma addressed with collective ritual, what has been deliberately destroyed in an atomized society. The participation of community, of integrating art and music and creative acts, is the invitation to make what is singular into something that reaches across the abyss of loneliness and isolation into a wider fabric.

Naomi Shihab Nye has this fabulous line from her poem Kindness,

You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore

This is the powerful thing, the way that all your sorrows daisy-chained to one another can be an anchor that drowns you individually, or it can be linked to the larger tapestry of infinite losses that is so a part of being human. Mind you, this doesn’t mean that grief and loss can’t feel enormously solitary. You’re still going to be the one that wakes up in the middle of the night, maybe, in tears as I have many times. We live with the paradox that we are alone…and yet we are not. But to see only one side and not the other is delusion.

The thing about friendships, and even better, the funky interactions when you have multiple friend groups and they all bring their complex interactions from the inheritances of race, culture, geography, language, gender, and life experiences is that you get the joy of surprise, what Samuel Hazo calls, “the holy surprise of right now” – such sources of delight and wonder and growth are these to me!

I’ve got one friend-group we jokingly call “6 menopausal women and a priest” (more seriously “Loving Entanglements”), another “The Fifth Muse” (there are only four of us), the “AwesomeFriends” (we may not have been entirely sober when we came up with that one a few decades back), another cadre we call “Charismatic Large Mammals” (because our friend has a biologist friend who, when asked what his job was, was to work with “charismatic large mammals” and that seemed as apt a name for us as any).

Each of these came into my life at different epochs and I’ve seen each change and shift and grow. This is the beautiful scar tissue of successful reaches, the friends who showed up when you had to move abruptly and came to pack boxes with you, the friends across every time zone you could call when the pain of a divorce was so keen that the arriving of grief at every hour of the day was gotten through in ten-minute spans of time.

There is something so sheerly, stunningly beautiful about the variety of interactions and the complexity of them that AI cannot give you, the unpredictability of them, the accompaniment, the camaraderie, the way these lives woven with yours make you and unmake you, the way love makes you and unmakes you, and what is the point if not that?! And then over decades to become fluid and porous enough to weave more lives in, until we’re firmly enmeshed in a tapestry of being, of shared griefs and shared joys that anchor us in that which is so much larger than ourselves.

My friend Jennifer Garvey Berger once said that things are complex enough that we ourselves aren’t enough to sensemake of everything, that we have to borrow the sensemaking of those close to us to be able to model more accurately the complexity of what we see around us. My friend Daniel and I were part of a group for a decade that we called the Intersubjective Incubator, where we literally poked holes at each other’s worldviews with love and respect – and got to a point where we could mentally model with some degree of predictability what someone might say or where we could find an ally or a dissenting point of view AND we would still surprise one another.

There’s this line from “A General Theory of Love”1 that I have found to be true, that “who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.”

It is mindboggling to me that people think AI can replace real relationships.

Okay, not mindboggling. I like having a sycophantic, know-it-all cheerleader as much as anyone, especially one that I’ve trained to occasionally tell me off for trying to get it to do thinking for me when I’m tired and lazy and don’t want to do an assignment after I’ve committed to doing too many damn things for too many people because boundaries have never been my strong suit in life. And, as someone perpetually curious, having an always-on being to patiently answer questions whatever time of day or night — like the ones I asked on the boat about pirate treasure and rock formations shaped like Skeletor’s fortress — is completely awesome on some level, because it is. But this is the AND to the art of developmental friendship.

You might think an AI could be the practice room — and indeed it can help you rehearse the ask, find the words before you try them on a person. But the practice room with a therapist worked because a fallible human sat opposite me — eyes I had to meet, a body I had to read, a nervous system mine could borrow and learn from, the way babies do from mothers. A construct has none of that to offer. It doesn’t require you to figure out how to be messy, to be met, and while that may be safe, that is not what we are built for — we gorgeous, messy, funny humans that grow and develop over the course of our lives in unpredictable ways.

An always available, never-disappointing AI responder can be soothing and tell us how wonderful we are, and we may buy into that because I like to be flattered as much as the next person, but I would argue that it becomes increasingly hollow over time because we get the self-soothing of the pacifier but not the nutrient. The healing is in the risk. I read this article in the New York Times about Devin Moss, an atheist chaplain accompanying Phillip Hancock, a man on death row. Hancock had one request of his spiritual adviser, drawn from Philippians 4:7-8. “Show me something real,” he said to Moss. “Tell me something true.” This has become a mantra for me in how I try to respond even to casual messages. I want to always give something real.

AI offers risk-free reach, which is nourishing IF you’re already fed by other sources, and starvation-inducing eventually if you’re not. You can have the same tool and yet opposing consequences, determined entirely by what you already arrive to it with. If you wonder why I’m obsessed a bit with the question of who you have to be in order to partner well with AI, this is it.

The pro-AI folks will say it makes everyone more capable, the doomsayers say it will hollow us out and make us dumber (and I keep saying “Oh, for f*ck’s sake, we really can’t afford to get dumber as a species!”), but both of those perspectives miss the conditional. What determines at an individual level whether we become more capable or not has to do with what lies in the domains outside of our interactions with AI. The richer our non-AI interactions, the less relationally load-bearing and therefore the more possibly creatively generative our relationship to AI can be.

Risk and friction are delicious. A life engineered to reduce risk has stripped out the pleasure of it along with the anxiety and the pain. I get anxiety, I do — remember I flunked out of college and spent years dealing with anxiety and depression, hence the reason I became a psychologist in the first place. (In Jungian parlance, there are no healers without wounds.)

The anxious stripping of vulnerability isn’t just making people lonely, but making them bored — and boring — and they may not even know it because their capacity to taste the other thing (”show me something real, tell me something true”) is broken.

Uncertainty is where the fun stuff lives. Yes, it’s anxiety producing, but so is the capacity to live with increasing amounts of anxiety to the point where anxiety is not the main driver of the system. You can deal with anxiety by trying to eliminate uncertainty, but given that uncertainty is as tidal a part of reality as the tides of the sea, best to learn to sail the ship than build seawalls fundamentally doomed to fail.

I name this with all the judgement of a single, 50-year-old woman with no children who just read in an article that I qualify for being a “solo ager,” being of the statistic of people over 50 without children to drive them to doctor’s appointments. (It is SO intriguing to find oneself a statistic...hard not to take it personally! Solo ager, indeed!)

And yet, from the chasmed opening of the original reaching wound, I have built this layered, beautiful, complex, unpredictable global web of friendships. I didn’t know I’d have a gorgeous lunch with a friend in Paris this week, or that I’d meet up again with an old friend I last saw by the shores of Lake Como a dozen years ago to wander around Verona with and take up a conversation as though no time had passed. These beautiful bits get dropped into a life as a consequence of – at last – learning to not just reach, but to receive with both hands wide open.

I built a web instead of a family, belying my childhood dreams of becoming the tyrannical matriarch of a family. Instead I have nieces and stepchildren, and a wide open future. Who knows what will happen next? And that’s the fun of it.

And this has made grief something so much more bearable, this intense tapestry of love. I’ve grieved before much more alone, and that kind of grief lies to you. (And actually, it doesn’t completely lie, because grief can be such an intensely personal thing that can feel solitary, the particular texture with which you experience it.) But there’s another layer on it sometimes that grief can whap you with, which is “Oh, hey, you’re unlovable too.” And in the latest rounds in the ring with grief recently, what I’ve found is another part of me saying, “Yeah… not so much.” Because the undeniability of being loved in my life was so clear, built out of the scar tissue of the reaching into this web of being loved, that any time this old wound of unloveability tried to raise its ugly head, it was so patently untrue that I couldn’t really do anything but laugh and gently pat it on the head. So rather than grief reinforcing an old wound, grief was cleaner, a little easier, and less prone to hanging around.

My bonus-”stepson” recently joked of Taylor Swift’s wedding, “Her thousand closest friends?? Not even Gayle has a thousand close friends!” (I suspect she does have a life rich in that, and I had a good laugh when bonus-family Samantha mentioned this to me.)

Yesterday, my friend Margaret made me watch an Instagram of a woman convinced she was spiritually married to Blackbeard, so I have a comparative should I ever truly despair about my love life. How does friendship get any better than this? Except maybe the time she made a whole New York bar serenade me with, “You gotta wash that man right outta your hair...” or maybe the time my friend Leanne gave my phone number to a stranger while I hid in the bathroom.... Memories start to crowd in, and as I start recalling the multitude of answers to the semi-rhetorical question, I find myself thinking of Whitman’s poem:

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles…

The goofy miracles of friendship are the best, the high school friends who still show up to walk your dog with you when you really don’t feel like it, the friend that sees you in exactly the way that you need to be seen and laughs with you (and frankly, also at you).

So I go back to this snippet of conversation I had with my mother where I was telling her that the thing I’ve learned about my friends when I go through a rough time and she interrupted me to say, “they weren’t there for you like family” (which is understandable she’d think so because blood family in Chinese culture is a very real force), but I got to firmly reply, “No. What I learned is that people across continents from every corner of my life showed up for me.” They are, for me, the lit beacons of Gondor, of Corsica.

Possibly the company haloed it as well, old friends and new gathering beneath the same roof, the kind of easy company where there’s the sound of splashing from children jumping into the pool, and someone volunteers to make a dinner that lingers long on the terrace, where we have to light the citronella candles to fight off the mosquitoes as we keep chatting, many hands make light work of the cleanup, and we bear the broken airconditioner in unbearable heat with some grace. And the finding our way together, of noticing who rises early and who late, who is up for the morning pilgrimage to the boulangerie for coffee and pain au chocolat, which in France can become a daily habit (note to self: for vacation-Gayle, not home-Gayle…).

A day in Calvi, this ancient fortified citadel (against pirates!) began with a climb to the top of the fortress, and then a descent straight into the cooling blue waters of the cove beneath the fortress for a swim, a shop for a new French bikini (always helpful to be egged on in shopping by a friend whose exuberant taste you admire). And then the adventure, when one of your sibling-friends has the brilliant idea to charter a boat to the caldera at the northern tip of Corsica, filled with narrow passages where the pirate Redbeard once anchored and where we splashed and snorkeled – so worth the minor sunburn. We ended the day with a gorgeous dinner in the charming town of Pigna, overlooking the whole bay illuminated by the setting sun.

And I haven’t yet really spoken of the sea, so clear as to see waving beds of seagrass and fish darting around one’s arms and legs, all these deep, changeable shades of blue, blue, blue that I can try to find words for… but why?

I was thinking of Fleur Adcock’s poem, “Weathering” (written for a very different landscape, the gorgeous fell country of northern England, but equally applicable for rugged Corsica), with the lines –

I was never a pre-Raphaelite beauty,

nor anything but pretty enough to satisfy

men who need to be seen with passable women.

But now that I am in love with a place

which doesn’t care how I look, or if I’m happy,

happy is how I look, and that’s all.

This little post-Florence sojourn has felt like golden days to soak into the skin. There was this shrine in Kyoto at Kiyumizudera Temple, where beneath the main shrine, you walk into this womb of absolute darkness that is meant to be a sort of rebirthing, and the rail that is your only guide down the steps into the deep is in the shape of a mala – palm sized beads along a rope.

I felt passed from friend to friend that way, from Leanne in Florence climbing the 435 steps of the Duomo for the perspective and views, a small pilgrimage to Juliet’s balcony in Verona and then a wander with Luca beneath the shade of first-century Roman arena, David and Shakiyla and Dana and new friends in Milan, then meeting with Daniel and Zoe in Genoa to board the ridiculous Looney Tunes-themed ferry boat (very literally Looney Tunes) that brought us to Corsica, then the wide open arms of our Corsica crew sharing the house with the addition of two completely delightful children, and then one last mala bead of meeting up with Aaron in Paris on layover at the most delightful restaurant tucked at the back of an open air market beneath the mansard-roofs of Paris

.

Which is, lately, a harder thing to take for granted — not in my house, but in the larger one we all live in. I was recently in Boston, at the 37th Annual Trauma Conference, invited by Licia Sky — sitting with hundreds of clinicians and practitioners working in fields where the moral residue of moral injury accumulates faster than it can be metabolized. At one point I asked my friend Mariah a question I thought was obvious: isn’t personal healing for social change at scale the whole point? Turns out, not obvious.

Gabor Maté was quoted as saying, “Inner work is always necessary — but it leaves you at the level of the individual, so it can still leave you isolated. It still leaves you thinking you’re this discrete creature in a disconnected universe. It does nothing to address the social causes that drive so much mental distress and mental affliction.”

This is the bind everywhere I turn right now. People feeling shut down and overwhelmed by the inundation of the world — sometimes doing the inner work and finding it insufficient, sometimes doing the outer work of systems change and movement building and coalition building and finding themselves depleted, burnt out, exhausted. The external sources of hope have been diminished for so many; the very institutions we rely on in a U.S. context of rule of law feel like they’re failing. This political moment — here and in much of the world — is producing exactly the conditions Hannah Arendt named as preconditions for totalitarian drift, specifically isolation that deepens into moral aloneness, the deliberate dismantling of the spaces between people, the healthy commons subject to atomization and commercialization.

If our sources for hope outside of us are untenable, what else is there?

I love the idea of wise hope — which, to be clear, is not contemplative consolation or a way of avoiding a situation. It is a discipline for staying engaged when the conventional grounds for hope are gone. Roshi Joan Halifax, my teacher, defines it this way: wise hope is not seeing things unrealistically but seeing them as they are, including the truth of suffering — both its existence and our capacity to transform it. It’s when we realize we don’t know what will happen that this kind of hope comes alive, in that spaciousness of uncertainty is the very space we need to act.

It is not optimism, which is the general prediction that things will turn out well, a forecast, a wager on outcomes the bettor does not control. In some ways optimism is the cheaper version of hope. Nor is it the surrender to despair, which is its own false certainty — the wager in the other direction, equally unmoored from the actual present. Wise hope refuses both predictions in favor of the unpredictable. It says, we do not know what will happen. We cannot know. And inside that not-knowing is the space we need to act. My favorite T.S. Eliot line lives here: wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing. The hope that gets in the way is the small hope, the hope-for-a-specific-outcome. What becomes possible without it is larger, hope as the ground of action, not the prediction of result.

Vaclav Havel, writing from his experiences of authoritarian regimes, said that hope is a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have it within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul. It is not the same as the joy that things are going well, or the willingness to invest in enterprises obviously headed for success, but rather the ability to work for something because it is good. Hope rooted not in the forecast, but in the work itself. This is hope that does not require Ithaka to make you rich; you keep Ithaka in your mind and journey on.

Roshi Joan teaches that wise hope has skillful expressions — skillful hope. In my chaplaincy training I wrote that it rests on practices: a commitment to skillful habits situated in the present and aspiring toward the future; it arises from uncertainty and impermanence; it enlarges resourcefulness, adaptability, courage, patience, and readiness; and it is grounded in interbeing. It also requires equanimity, one of the seven factors of awakening — the steadiness the Vietnamese-French teacher Vô Sự calls the state in which you have critical work to do and you do it effortlessly. Because of these, hope is not passive. It is engaged, urgent, and timely.

What Maté was naming is the necessary-yet-insufficiency of inner work. It is not enough to do inner work, nor may we abandon it — Maté himself would insist on this — but the task is to refuse the binary. The inner work is the ground from which the outer work becomes possible. The outer work is the field within which the inner work is granted its meaning. Neither alone is sufficient; both together are what wise hope makes possible.

This is what Rebecca Solnit pointed at when she spoke at Upaya in November 2025. We sit inside a precious moment, she said. We make the future in the present. And we sit in a 2,500-year-old lineage passed warm-hand-to-warm-hand, circling like the musk ox against the ice storm — the adults surrounding the calves with their bodies and horns when the predators come. The herd survives because it refuses to fragment. The wise hope is not in the prediction that the storm will end. It is in the act of circling. The act of staying with one another, in accompaniment.

This is also what Halifax meant invoking Brecht — in the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes. There will be singing about the dark times. Singing is not the optimism that they will pass, it is the act that arises within them, the refusal to let the dark times have the only voice. The singing is the practice.

And it is a deliberate shaping of attention. The nervous system, under chronic threat, narrows to scan for danger. Wise hope is the practice of widening the aperture anyway — attending to where the light gets in, what at the Hearthland Foundation, we call the small openings, the unexpected coalitions, the strange grace that arrives sideways when the front door is closed. We widen our attention. The usual is real, the conditions are real. But what is really real is wider than the usual makes visible, and the practice is to keep the wider field perceptible — to perceive possibility while staying in honest relationship with what is.

I have written before about what I call the anyways — the things you do anyway, regardless of whether the work will be finished in your lifetime. My father once asked me, with love, why I would commit my life to something — women’s human rights, an end to sex trafficking — that wouldn’t be done by the time I died. The answer was that some things are hard, and you don’t know the outcome, and you do them anyway. The anyways is the practical form of wise hope, what you do when you have set down the demand for predictable outcomes and what remains is the work itself.

Norman Fischer, in The World Could Be Otherwise, names the bodhisattva vows as outrageously extravagant and absurdly imaginative — because of their sheer impossibility, we keep walking toward a horizon. The only way to practice the impossible is to practice it anyway, with joy and good humor, as an act of imagination. This is why I think wise hope is, finally, imaginative. John Paul Lederach calls it the moral imagination — the capacity to hold the thriving of those you consider other inside a shared vision of the future. It refuses the toxic imagination Solnit warned against, the one that feeds on fear and division and becomes the imprisonment of the present, and commits instead to the liberating imagination: the capacity to be what is possible even while seeing the impossible.

The doing of the work does not leave you unscathed. I’ve been working with activists and NGOs for 25 years. My friend Omid Safi, in a conversation for my chaplaincy thesis, was so beautifully open with me about the costs of this. It has hardened me, he said. I don’t know that one can have that open heart of strong back and soft front, and live through this period, and be unaffected. (And yet, he still speaks daily about love to his communities and sources himself in the traditions of Vincent Harding, and Martin Luther King Jr., and the Sufi mystics.) What I notice in those who have stayed with the work the longest — the activists, the peacebuilders, the chaplains — is not that the work left them unscarred, but that they built around themselves the practices and communities that supported their ability to keep going. Jhanisse Vaca Daza, who led the civil resistance against the Morales regime in Bolivia, told me that what kept her alive in the worst stretches was not only her practices but the people who were present when she was not sure she could continue. The sangha is the structural ground of wise hope. Inner work alone cannot hold this.

So wise hope is also, structurally, a practice of refusing isolation — the deliberate building of the human circle of accompaniment that holds what no one of us can hold alone, the active resistance to the atomization that authoritarianism cultivates as infrastructure. It is we before it is I — while still being I enough to do the next thing in front of you, in the time that is yours, the work that is yours, the history, craft, presence, and skills you uniquely have to bear.

And here I want to cast a little light on a shadow I’ve watched play out in myself, how wise hope can curdle into a bravado, a spiritual confidence. “I act from vow, not outcome; I love without hope; I am non-attached.” This has, underneath, its own subtle grasping. The language of non-attachment can become a hedge, a way of pre-securing myself against disappointment by claiming I was never attached to the outcome in the first place. That is not the equanimity of trees I once tried to apprentice myself to in the wilds of Montana. That is armor wearing equanimity’s robes, and I’ve definitely tried it on (well, I’ll try nearly anything on…).

I have a lovely variation of the same evasion, with a different face. Sometimes hope keeps me from asking the clarifying question, from real discovery, from reaching all the way, from naming the thing I actually want — because some part of me would rather keep the hope intact than risk the answers that might end it. The not-knowing becomes a place to hide. I tell myself I am being spacious, holding the outcome loosely, when really I have chosen specific blinders to protect the hope. That is clearly not non-attachment either. That is hope protecting itself by refusing to look squarely — which runs counter to something I deeply believe, that leaders must either face themselves unblinking or ramp up their delusions to cope. I would rather face it. (Though, I sometimes have compassion for the delusions we sometimes hold to live our lives. I have less patience when they impact others.)

The awareness needed is not to hope less, and not to stop reaching. We still need to hope because it matters — the hope that reaches, that bends will toward what it wants, that places the bet, that sparks generative things because it draws like moths to flame. It is what makes anything new possible, the opposite of the dammed river. A life that has stopped reaching has stopped living, and I want no part of that. The reaching is not the problem. The bravado is the problem — the subtle protective move that wields non-attachment as a shield against being humbled, rather than letting it be a true loosening of the grip.

So I return, as I always seem to, to the actual discipline of non-attachment to outcome, the real ability to be with not-knowing. Not the absence of wanting, but wanting fully, with all one’s longing and wholeheartedness, and yet holding loosely. (This is Karin Aarons’ “your longing must be so strong that you forget who is longing and for what.”) Not love that protects itself by claiming it expected nothing, but love that reaches with its whole chest cavity wide open and then also opens the hand. This is what Benjamin meant, I think, by the “only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope” — not the renunciation of desire, but desire freed from the demand that it be requited. The hope stays, even as we let go of the bargain, and with it comes a clearsightedness. And the hardest part is that you only find out which one you were practicing — the bravado or the real thing — at the moment the outcome you wanted does not arrive, and you watch what you do with your hands.

So, circling back in this season of taking stock at the threshold of a new chapter — with a first few beautiful nights in my new house, a chaplaincy thesis still being reworked, conditions in the world exactly as bleak and tumultuous as people say, and aid to organize this week for Venezuela in the wake of a devastating earthquake — wise hope does not require the situation to improve. It does not require evidence of progress. It does not require a guarantee. It requires only a commitment to act anyway, because it is good, and a practice of staying in contact with the people, the work, and the practices that allow one’s own deepest vows and volition to be sustained.

Jane Hirshfield writes: what is usual is not what is always. Not ungraspable hope, not the consolation of stories. Only the reminder that there is exception, that hearing may come back, that birds quiet for decades may migrate back to the ear. That what looks structural and unbreakable may yet have a hairline crack through which the light gets in. And then the practice is being someone who can recognize the exception when it arrives — because of the shape of one’s attention — and act.

The expert mind has few possibilities; the beginner’s mind has many. The discouraged mind sees no exception. The wisely hoping mind sees the day’s offering and meets it, again and again.

So I find myself asking, of myself and of you: Where is your circle? What is the practice that lets you stay engaged when the odds are long? And what is the work you are committed to anyway — because it is good — regardless of whether you will see its fruition?

We make the future in the present. The singing in the dark times is the singing about the dark times. The horizon recedes as you walk toward it, and we walk anyway, as Machado wrote: caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar (walker there is no road, we make the road by walking).

I say it that way on purpose, because if one is going to be heartbroken, Florence is an excellent place to do it. I’ve a great wardrobe for it — floating lacy dresses, a broad sunhat, sunglasses, things faintly reminiscent of Helena Bonham Carter in A Room with a View. (I really should have been born in another era.) I’ve had the perfect excuse for endless gelato and wine spritzers while the great dome of the Duomo rises pink and agate-green behind me. A woman weeping in a piazza in a beautiful dress is not a tragedy here. She is practically a civic feature. A stranger took a photo of me amidst the medieval monastic cells of San Marco, tear tracks and all, and then chased me down to give it to me. This is the challenge and the gift of being a Four on the Enneagram as I’ve learned from my dearest friends Aftab and Aliki. If we do nothing else well, we gleefully metabolize big feelings at our finest. That is the funny part.

The less funny part is the weeping wakings, the reaching for the phone before I remember there is nothing to expect there but silence. (This is sort of not true since I do the other thing I have learned to do, which is reach out to friends and get help, and have people across multiple time zones reaching back, so my phone has actually been inundated with supportive messages — just not from the one person I want to hear from. :p) I have stared at that silence and wanted to scream, “why is there nothing here”, knowing I requested the nothing myself. I have wished, in the small, petty, mean night hours, that he is as haunted as I am. I have thought, more than once and not entirely as a joke, “I was too much” — (or “not enough”, I can’t decide which) — which is the oldest sentence I and almost every other woman I know latches onto, and a known lie, and it still claws up out of the psychological subterranean grave I have shoveled it into and jumped up and down on for literal decades, whenever I am tired enough. These less coherent, petty pieces want a little light before any grace.

There are a few lines I have organized a life around. Give me whatever it is that will not be again — from my favorite Samuel Hazo poem.¹ A Sufi prayer I love as litany, Lord, shatter my heart for a limitless love.² And Adrienne Rich’s gorgeous words on love,³

An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other. It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity. It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

So I said these lines aloud to him recently, in a piazza while watching the world go by near a carousel, the same fluffy white dog crossing our path again a second day in a row, and he said, mildly, 'Be careful what dogmas you keep.'" And I thought — standing in exactly this kind of beautiful wreckage as I have before— Could I not have chosen easier dogmas? I could have, possibly. But I don’t think I’d be me if I had, and I wouldn’t trade them for anything. The last line of this book I love is, “You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.⁴

Three marriages and any number of endings, personal and professional, have made me very competent at endings. This is not a thing I set out to be good at. (Does anyone? Why would anyone? This is not generally seen as a good idea!) It is a little like being good at the hairy HR problem — and I am very good at the hairy HR problem — which means that whenever an organization I am near has one, I know exactly where it lands. On my desk. The competency summons the task, usually in the shape of the thing no one else wants to touch with a ten-foot pole.

The wrong lesson, in any case, is be careful what you’re good at. Protect yourself. Hold something back. Stop being the one who can do the hard goodbye cleanly, so the hard goodbyes stop finding you. I have had that thought. It is a little like how, as a teenager, I used to pretend to be bad at washing dishes so my mother would stop making me do them, which of course never worked. (Oddly, much like the hairy HR problem, I now find washing dishes at fifty quite comforting.) The right lesson is actually to become competent at the things that are hardest to wade into, because those are the ones with the most unexpected gifts folded inside them.

I loved Harry Potter for awhile — no surprise that I’d love a world of magic. There’s a symbol from the final book that I love, where Harry holds the golden snitch to his lips — the one that has stayed sealed shut the entire story — and whispers, I open at the close. And it opens. And what this incredibly powerful magic orb gives Harry is no less than the company of everyone who ever loved him, gathered to walk beside him into the one ending he most has to face — the willing walk toward his own death, no guarantees, with everything at stake. The snitch opens at the close to hand him accompaniment for the hardest thing. And what’s on the other side of that walk, which is an unguaranteed bet you have to place again and again, is a greater life.

That is the thing. It’s not to seal, or shut down, or compress at the ends of things — which is normal and human — but to open at the endings, to stay undefended through the very part that most invites the armoring.

Because the alternative — sealing, hoarding the hurt, letting grief silt up behind a wall, telling the simpler story, letting bitterness color perception or overwrite beauty — is what actually dams and damns a life. I think of life sometimes as a river, and when it runs clean it washes the banks of residue and accumulation, and what it leaves is not wreckage but wider capacity: the capacity to say the true and difficult thing, the capacity not to turn from what is hard for the sake of what might be good, and — I hope, since I have not yet reached the end of this beautiful and hard life — the capacity to meet, someday, the endings none of us are spared.

So great girlfriends ask great questions, and my friends Eman and Susan both wanted to shove my face at a thing I have trouble looking at, and Eman asks the question, “What is it that my attention needs to be directed on instead?” I’ve been going round-and-round on this question I’m still ruminating over for myself as I look at my life, the question about what’s really underneath all the competence. Mastery usually comes from wounding — you get good at the thing you had to, in order to survive. So when I have learnt to be undefended at the end, when I open the hand instead of closing it, I wonder what it is I’m actually looking at. Is it mastery, a hard-won capacity I can be proud of? Or is it the elegant shape an older difficulty has learned to make? It’s not that I believe myself unlovable (I don’t) but that somewhere I wonder if I learned to give love more easily than I learned to be received by it, to let it land and stay? (Probably both.) I wonder if I have always found it easier to open my hand to let something go than to open it to be held. So perhaps I am simply very good at a kind of opening that costs me less. Hafiz wrote: I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.⁵ I think I am not so good at letting someone hold that light up to me without rather skillfully sliding away from it. I suspect the leaving-grace and the receiving-difficulty are two weaves of the same threads I may never untangle the strands of.

So as I likely sit anew in the what-ifs, what-might-have-beens, probably around 3am, when a sense of loss arrives unbuffered, I have to remember it is never as large as it feels at that witching hour. But more than the what-ifs, I remember now that I am so grateful to be astonished by a life that can hold what The Fault in Our Stars calls “an infinity within its numbered days”. I had days that were a small infinity, and I would not give them back to be spared this.

The morning of his going — before I even knew it was the morning of his going — I sat in a café by the Arno writing to Pádraig. I told him I could already see the shape of the heartbreak coming, that I’d been reading The Facts of Life and Readings from the Book of Exile, chapter four especially, laughing at myself as I cried, grateful for words that can hold hard things and so help me hold them — grateful for that form of accompaniment.

And Pádraig gave me the phrase the Persians use to open a story, the way we might use once upon a time — “yeki bood, yeki nabood”. It means, “something was, something wasn’t” — as he defined it, “the making and unmaking of things held together in rhyme and story.” I’ve been thinking on the phrase since, the beauty of it, and the undeniability of both halves — that I got the presence of something, and then something wasn’t, the arising and the passing away of a thing in the lineage of storytelling.

So walking the streets of Florence with my friend Leanne, and letting in the noise, the operatic street musicians, the texts and calls from friends, the handsome Italian stranger who asked me to dinner, and the excellent gelato do its work on me, I can still — and this is the thing I keep checking, the way you sometimes prod a bruise — hear the birds. There’s a Zen koan I once heard and have never been able to find again that the difference between heaven and hell is whether you can still hear birdsong, because in hell, of course, you can’t. And so I keep paying attention to birdsong. Fine then, says the tree at the end of Ada Limón’s poem,⁶ a new leaf unfurling like a fist opening to a palm. I’ll take it all.

Also. Just FYI, I’m fine. You can generally tell when I find things funny again like wandering around Florence like a gothic heroine, and the lovely thing about practices of impermanence is that you can throw yourself into the metabolizing of things because everything arises and passes away. I value grieving - grief is praise for what you’ve lost (Martin Prechtel) and things worth grieving are worth grieving well. Grief teaches you the shape of ineffable things. And I’m so surrounded by love and beauty.

I’ll take it all.

Instructions on Not Giving Up
by Ada Limón

Notes

1. Samuel Hazo, “The Quiet Proofs of Love.”

2. A prayer I keep. (Source unknown)

3. Adrienne Rich, “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying” (1977), in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence.

4. John Green, The Fault in Our Stars (2012).

5. Hafiz, as rendered by Daniel Ladinsky, The Gift.

6. Ada Limón, “Instructions on Not Giving Up.”

So many things feel like a threshold.

I love thresholds, the bardo territory, the in-between, the place where you are not yet who you are becoming. They have been the periods of my most surprise, my richest growth. If I had to name what has carried me into and through them, I would name four braided strands: the immensity of love I have felt from family and friends, movement in metabolizing physically what moves through me, a sense of humor which is completely priceless for all the moments I’ve thought, “Seriously?!” and “WTF?” and “Oh dear god.” And…before any of the others can do their work, the practice of being with not-knowing.

In the Zen tradition I have apprenticed to through Roshi Joan Halifax, the discipline of being with what cannot yet be known has a name: not-knowing.

Bernie Glassman, who founded the Zen Peacemakers, named three tenets at the heart of the order. Not-knowing. Bearing witness. Compassionate action. You cannot bear witness if you arrive already knowing what you are looking at. You cannot act compassionately if your action is in service of a conclusion you have already drawn. Not-knowing is what makes everything else possible. It is also about as antithetical to a world that prides itself on certainty as a discipline can possibly be.

Roshi Joan Halifax, who walks in this lineage, quotes Suzuki Roshi as saying: in the expert mind, there are few possibilities. In the beginner’s mind, many. Knowing can be a defense, and certainly the human propensity to name things is intensely that. To arrive at a bedside, at a negotiation, at a country in crisis, with a category already in place — this is grief, this is a problem to solve, this is what is wrong — is to foreclose what could actually emerge. Roshi Joan teaches that ego rests in the experience of certainty. To practice not-knowing is to interrupt the egoic pattern long enough for something else to be possible.

I may say this glibly, but this is harder than it sounds. The mind reaches, constantly, for the comfort of having figured something out, and the body braces against uncertainty. Jennifer Garvey Berger, my dear friend and colleague at Cultivating Leadership, has written about this in her book Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps — she cites research showing how strongly the human nervous system resists uncertainty, to the point that people will sometimes prefer a terminal diagnosis to the ongoing experience of not knowing. That is how much our nervous systems crave certainty, even the certainty of death, which like taxes is most certainly certain. But seriously, our nervous systems prefer death to uncertainty. It is mindboggling. The instinct of helpfulness, in particular, wants to know what to do, what to say, what to promise.

As a biographical note, I’m the daughter of two doctors and I became a consultant, for goodness’ sake. Of course I love telling people what to do. I’ve made a career out of it. I’ve sounded so certain that I’ve had random tour groups in foreign countries handed to me, and I’ve had hiking groups start following me — which is laughable if you know me well enough to know I have very little sense of direction. I was once the guest of a guest at a wedding, and halfway through, the groom — a stranger to me — watched me managing the chaos when torrential rains started, and said, “You look like someone comfortable with a microphone. Would you emcee the rest of the wedding?” The look on my friend’s face when he saw me with the mic announcing the bride and groom is one I’ll not forget anytime soon.

And yet.

I have learned, through the years and the work and the failures, that the certainty I was trained into has a cost. Some of the most important conversations of my life have happened in the moments I did not know what to say and any frame I could offer fell short. In the human rights work, situations could be so fraught with PTSD, torture, and profound trauma that only my grounded presence — being a non-anxious presence in moments of escalating panic — was sufficient to the moment. Early in my career, I had coaching sessions where the framework was already assembling itself before the client had finished the sentence, and the assembling was the very thing keeping me from hearing what I needed to hear. I’ve facilitated in groups and in leadership rooms where my I-know-what-to-do was producing confident-sounding wrong answers, and the actual answer was waiting in someone else’s silence.

The hardest thing I have had to unlearn is the relief of certainty. It is also the most freeing thing I’ve learned and the one that has, I think, allowed a different path in life than I might have otherwise occupied. I’ll never know those other paths, but I do know I love this one.

And this is the part that took me years to live my way slowly into: the Zen practice of not-knowing is not the cultivation of mushiness or wishy-washiness. It is not the relinquishing of opinion or values or having a perspective, because I definitely have lots of those. It is the willingness to hold one’s experience and knowledge and theory loosely enough that they can be shaped by what is actually present. This is the expert who can become a beginner again — in the room, with this person, in this relationship, with this question, with this situation, this moment. This is the integration the practice asks for.

The Western philosophical lineage has its own names for the recognition of the importance of not knowing. I love that Keats called it negative capability. In an 1817 letter to his brothers he wrote of the capacity to be in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. The irritable reaching is such a great phrase… I love the irritable, impatient, dogmatic reach, especially when I’m underresourced and compressed. The reach itself is the problem. Most of what passes for thinking is the body’s flight from not-yet-knowing into the relief of a conclusion. Keats saw the discipline of staying with what is unknown.

My beloved friend Lesley Hazleton names it from a different angle: to be in your own unknowing can be an act of courage, staying with something enough for its nature to reveal itself. The verb she uses is staying, again. What is it with the staying? That is the practice, so often not sexy, not escaping, not solving, but staying. There is a fragility to the intolerance of uncertainty. The brittle fundamentalisms of our public life — religious, political, ideological — are evidence of the cost of refusing to stay. People who cannot bear not-knowing make worlds in their own image and then defend those worlds against everything that does not fit. The defense is the suffering, and we see the effects rippling outward everywhere in the many polarizations of our world.

The 14th-century Christian text The Cloud of Unknowing, written by an anonymous English mystic, names the via negativa as the path to the divine. By love God may be reached and held, but by thinking, never. The Cloud is the apophatic tradition — the recognition that what is most worth knowing cannot be known by any of the means we use to know other things. That insight predates Zen Peacemakers by six centuries, but circles the same territory.

The recognition is not only mystical. Organizational systems have their own version of it. Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework names a complex domain — the domain of human systems, ecosystems, organizations under stress — where cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect. In simple domains you analyze and decide. In complicated domains you bring in experts. In complex domains you must probe, sense, respond. You act in small ways to find out what the system will do, and you let the system teach you what is needed. Trying to plan the way you would in a complicated domain produces brittle plans that shatter on contact with reality. Moltke, the 19th-century Prussian field marshal, knew this from war: no plan survives first contact with the enemy. The complex domain is not battle. But the recognition is the same. Reality refuses our forecasts. I love that from mystics to generals, the same recognition surfaces in every tradition that has had to act under conditions where reality refuses to be predicted.

This is the working language we use at Cultivating Leadership. We are in a complex domain. The expert-mind moves you make in this room will produce confident-sounding, but wrong answers. The work is to probe, attend, stay with what arises. This is not-knowing in business clothing, this fundamental tenet of Zen applied to the world of work.

What both traditions know is that the failure mode of leadership (and of chaplaincy, and of love, and of inquiry) is the premature foreclosure of possibility. Knowing too early. Naming too early. Acting before listening. The cost of that foreclosure is that we never get to find out what was actually possible (and I do love to preserve optionality). The system tells us what we already thought it would tell us. The conversation produces the answer we walked in with. We mistake our own echo for the world.

I think of a stretch of work I did, some years ago, with the Unreasonable Institute — an organization that, as the name suggests, supported social entrepreneurs in being audaciously unreasonable. I was donating a limited amount of coaching time, and so they booked me back-to-back from morning till evening, and I will fully confess to being somewhat catatonic by the end of the day, plus jet-lagged. I was committed to showing up to every organization that had an hour with me. The structure, in a way I did not see at the time, made me do some of my best work. All I could do was bring both my knowing and my unknowing, and somehow dropping any sense of my knowing created something tangible and real — an actual meeting. The English word meeting comes from Old English mētan — to find, to encounter, to come upon. We ended up encountering one another. Instead of just exhaustion, something fresh would emerge: something that turned out to be actual helpfulness.

I think of the chaplaincy work, where I sit with people whose lives are unraveling, and the temptation to say something useful is constant, and the discipline is to refuse it. Not because nothing can be said, but because what can be said has to arrive from the meeting itself in an emergent way from intersection and interaction, that frothy alive edge, not from my preparation. The teachings I have absorbed are in me. They do not need to be deployed at will at the first opportunity to do so. They arise when they are needed, or they do not. Either way the work is to be there.

I think of leadership conversations where the most generative move is the words I do not know — said as invitation rather than confession. The action inquiry tradition I learned from Bill Torbert lived in that field. No one could be in charge of what would be discovered, and the not-knowing made the discovery possible.

I think of the work I am doing now, advising organizations on AI integration while holding a board seat at the Center for Humane Technology. We are inside a phenomenon that no one — not the technologists building it, not the policymakers regulating it, not the leaders deploying it, not the contemplatives reckoning with it — fully understands. Everyone wants a damn playbook, and even if we had one, the technology is changing so fast that the technology stack is likely to be substantially shifted six months from now. The discipline is to refuse the performance of knowing, to bring the knowing that is real — decades of organizational practice with leadership and cultures, a developmental frame, a sense of what depletes a system and what nourishes it — and to bring the unknowing alongside it: I do not know what this will become. I do not know what it will do to attention, to relationship, to children, to democracy, to work, to love. No one does. The not-knowing, openly claimed, is what keeps the conversation in the complex domain Snowden described.

And here, having just turned 50, on this threshold, the practice is being asked of me in a different way.

There are loves whose outcome I cannot know. There are commitments whose ripening I cannot predict. There are years ahead whose shape will be made by my walking, not by my forecasting. The capacity to be in any of it without grasping is the work. To be fully present to what is here, without the small comforting hope that bends the future toward my wish, is the discipline Walter Benjamin named when he wrote the only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope. It is what Roshi Joan teaches when she says ego rests in certainty. It is what Hazleton means by staying. Keats called it negative capability. The anonymous English mystic of The Cloud reached toward God by love rather than by thinking. Snowden, in a different idiom, calls it probe-sense-respond. Every tradition that has tried to teach a person how to be with a real life has eventually arrived at this recognition.

The expert mind has few possibilities. The beginner’s mind has many.

After decades of apprenticing myself to this teaching, I think I know at last (hah) that not-knowing is not a deficit to be remedied, but rather the condition of being alive to one’s actual life. The cost of refusing it is that we live in our own forecasts rather than in the world. The gift of accepting it is that the world is allowed to be larger than our prediction of it — to live in the possible rather than just the probable, or perhaps Emily Dickinson’s possibility as a fairer house than prose.

Here I am on a Sunday afternoon after a friend’s delightful backyard pig roast party — with a move-in date in June and dogs who are now Californian and a thesis due shortly and a leadership role taking its next shape and beloveds gathering in the months ahead, with visible commitments and invisible questions. I still have my four braided strands carrying me — practice, love, movement, humor — and I am still willing to step with not-knowing into this bardo territory. The future is unknown. The stepping is what we are asked to do anyway — with visible commitments and invisible questions, with strangers and beloveds I will meet — find, encounter, come upon — in the years ahead.

I love thresholds. They are where the next form of you arrives.

When my marriage ended last year, in the middle of its unraveling, I told my then-husband I never wanted either of us to be able to doubt that I was willing to leave everything on the field before I left it (to use a sports analogy, for someone atrociously bad at sports). I showed up — possibly too late, and willing to own my contribution to what Esther Perel calls the invisible degradation of a marriage — but also fully in every conversation, in every letter written, every attempt at repair, every last offering. The not-holding-back was the gift I gave myself. And when it was clear it was over, I think more than anything, that’s what let me walk away cleanly. Not because there was no grief — believe me, there was oh so much — but because I had nothing left to wonder about, no regret over half-measures and things unsaid or things ungiven. And it’s kind of an incredible thing to know you’re capable of that in the face of a situation that would have made prematurely walking away just so easy. You learn a lot about who you are when the chips are down, and it turns out, I like that person.

I’m coming to think that this is what life consistently asks of me, and perhaps of all of us. To turn toward what is arriving and what is leaving, sometimes at once. To choose to feel all of it. To refuse to protect ourselves out of fear of the thing itself — or out of the ending of it. We are collectively bad at letting things become truly intimate, up close to our own skin.

There was a period I was obsessed with this Jane Hirshfield poem, The Tongue Says Loneliness:

The tongue says loneliness, anger, grief,
but does not feel them.
As Monday cannot feel Tuesday,
nor Thursday reach back to Wednesday
as a mother reaches out for her found child.
As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
Not a bell, but the sound of the bell in the bell-shape,
lashing full strength with the first blow from inside the iron.

The tongue says loneliness. But the saying is already mediated, already after the fact, already at one remove from the immediacy of the moment. Hirshfield is naming the gap between the word for a thing and the thing itself, between the container and what fills it, differentiating between the gate (the structure) and the horse plunging through — where you can almost viscerally feel the sense of motion and aliveness and movement.

The bell is not the life. What makes a bell a bell is the sounding of it, the ringing of it, the reverberation caught in time. Hirshfield’s word for that is lashing — full strength, from inside the iron, the blow that makes the bell finally a bell, and it is not some soft tinkling little thing.

The frame is not the painting. The life is not the thing said about the life, but the living, ringing through. This is Rilke’s be the glass that shatters as it rings — the unmaking in the midst of the making. There is something here about the unborn in the midst of our born existence, but that is a different post.

The temptation, when something is hard or temporary or ending or just frankly unpredictable, is to stay near the gate where the delusion of safety is a little closer to hand. There, we can possibly name it, label it, prepare better, hold a little back so the going and the ending will hurt less. The tongue says, this is going to be painful, and the body, taking instruction from the tongue, begins to brace (and lived memory, because that is what we do).

The bracing is not the living. Kafka wrote: You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

The gate is just the shape the life is moving through. The bracing is not protection but a form of absence, of holding back. To stay near the gate, in the safety of having-not-yet-plunged, is to mistake the form for the lived thing.

So I am practicing letting the tongue and the body both be true — the naming and the experiencing, the ache of memory and anticipation, and the aliveness, the terrifying and the delicious. Grief and praise are deeply entwined, fear and longing rise together. Let them.

Walter Benjamin wrote, The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope. I’ve turned this one over in my mind time and time again, and I think this is true. This is loving without negotiation, without the projections and expectations of what might be or could be. It is a kind of brutal clear-sightedness that is so hard because we are fundamentally creatures of projections, longings, and wants.

I had this moment on the other side of this when I was post-divorce from my second husband, in realizing that I actually loved him better and more for exactly the person he was, not who I wanted to shove into a “husband”-shaped profile in my head. I was so startled by how clean that became in the wake of our separation.

I think this is true also of a season, a place, a body of work, a friendship that will not last forever, a life. To know any of it requires loving it without hope of what it might become — without the shape you wanted to stuff it into. Loving what is actually here, plunging, present, in its full inhabiting.

Plunging, ringing, lashing, loving, shattering. This is the whole work. This is the whole life.

Mary Oliver: Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Hillel the Elder, two thousand years before her: If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?

Rumi’s: When will you begin that long journey into yourself?

David Ignatow, asking so gorgeously: I wish I understood the beauty in leaves falling. To whom are we beautiful as we go? I’ve thought of this one walking the fire-stained mountains of autumn in Japan, shifting seas of red and gold day over day as I walked the Nakasendo trail.

And John O’Donohue, who left the world too early but left this question for the rest of us: How will you shape a life equal to and as beautiful and as astonishing as a world that can birth you and that you will go from?

These are questions that ask you to live into them, sometimes for years, before they offer back a glimmer of what they might mean. As Cavafy’s great poem Ithaka implies:

Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is what you’re destined for. But don’t hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years, so you’re old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

It’s nearly impossible to reference living into questions without evoking Rilke’s famous and oft-quoted words from his Letters to a Young Poet, Letter Four, from Worpswede on July 16, 1903:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

This is the passage every reader of Rilke knows. Even people who have read no other Rilke have encountered his live the questions now. What is less often said is that Rilke was very much in the midst of his own questions, his own crisis. He was twenty-seven, recently married, recently a father, in deep uncertainty about how to live as an artist while also being a husband and a father (and kind of being shit at it, frankly). He was a young poet in crisis writing to a younger poet in crisis, and he definitely did not have anything figured out in his writing. But I think that’s part of his appeal — that he wrote from within his wondering toward a fellow wanderer, hoping it might land alongside some wondering of your own.

In the midst of my divorce, my mother asked me a question in the particular way a Chinese mother can ask. “What if you’ll be alone forever?” It was, of course, an echo of her own loving fears for her daughter — and so many of the questions people ask you are reflections of their own fears as much as they are about you.

A girlfriend of mine was in the midst of her own divorce when she asked me, “How can I ever think about loving again?” (For one wild second, I was tempted to say, you might be alone forever! And then I remembered I’m not my beloved mother — and that it took me decades to find the sense of humor and the ability to see the love behind my mother’s question, to land somewhere closer to thanks, Mom, that’s not quite so helpful right now.) From within my own wondering, because like Rilke, pretending I had the answers was just not going to cut it, I said instead — very slowly — I still want to be a woman who believes in it, to find the innocence of it again on the other side of heartbreak. So what does it take to keep choosing love? How do I still be the woman who believes in love, even with a broken heart? (I still love this insane Rumi-attributed prayer: Shatter my heart so a new room can be created for a Limitless Love.)

No easy or fast answers here, as I sit with the same thoughts over a decade later. The question actually begs, deserves, and beckons as a question I’ve had to live my way into over time. And the question itself has shaped my life now for twenty-five years, kept me oriented toward something larger than the immediacy of various beautiful wreckages across different epochs. Beautiful questions are anchored in both the known and the unknown, and between those two poles is where your life is lived.

Krista Tippett, who has spent twenty years on On Being refining the art of asking questions, says it like this: each of us is shaped as much by the quality of the questions we are asking as by the answers we have it in us to give. And: questions elicit answers in their likeness; answers rise and fall to the questions they meet.

This is what I notice with leaders and teams as well. The question frames both agendas and possibilities. What’s wrong with this team? produces a different organization than What is this team trying to become? Who is to blame? produces a different culture than what does this moment ask of us? The shape of the question shapes the shape of the answer. Bad questions corner, incite, sometimes entertain, but are mostly born out of our worst fears. They tend to produce pretty shit answers, or to orient us toward the wrong thing entirely. Beautiful questions invite — they broaden the available horizon, they beckon, they create a possible future that has not yet come into being and can’t come into being without the asking of them.

A beautiful question also creates a particular kind of space between people. Nick Cave, writing in Faith, Hope and Carnage about how new art comes into being, calls this a kind of mutual unknowing. The artist doesn’t arrive with the answer. The collaborator doesn’t arrive with the answer. They arrive with the question, and they make a room together where neither is in charge of what gets discovered. Lesley Hazleton says something parallel about doubt: to be in your own unknowing can be an act of courage, staying with something enough for its nature to reveal itself. There is a fragility to the intolerance of uncertainty. There is a strength in being willing to not yet know, and to be so robust in that stance that something else becomes possible.

Most of the questions in our public life are performances — assumptions masked as inquiries, looking for a fight; have you tried doing x advising masquerading as open-ended question. Most of the questions in our work life are tactical — asking only what can be answered in the next forty-five minutes, an outcome orientation that is sometimes pragmatic and necessary, but often not suited to the real complexity that lies before so many of us who weave through businesses. To ask a beautiful question requires that you slow down enough to not need an immediate answer. It requires you to be willing to not know for long enough that something true can arrive.

Part of my inheritance of the art of asking the beautiful question also comes through David Whyte, who says that answering a beautiful question gives you the opportunity to overhear yourself saying something. That is the gift of a question that is large enough — you find out what you actually think, sometimes in the moment of saying it, sometimes years later. John O’Donohue, who passed the baton on beautiful questions to David in his dying, traced the Greek origin of beauty — kallos — back to kalon, the same root as calling. Beauty calls us. A beautiful question is one that calls. Not every question calls. Some questions only demand.

In the early months of the pandemic, I worked with my dear friend Keith Yamashita on a series called This Human Moment — six online gatherings to help leaders and teams find ground in a landscape that had no ground. One of the practices we built into the architecture was the daily ritual of asking a more beautiful question, which Keith has his own unique takes on and has internalized as a practice. We made it a discipline you could practice in the morning, with your team, with your family. We co-created a list of fifty-three beautiful questions you could begin with on any given day.

Around the same time, I was developing the practice of co-sensing — a way of listening across difference where the point is not to project your own perspective but to broaden it. The pandemic was so complex and so unknown in its early days. I remember standing in front of the Star Store, our local grocery, thinking, I don’t even know how to go in. What was routine, like buying milk, suddenly sent me into a tailspin. Were homemade masks okay? Did I need gloves? Co-sensing came out of attuning to the experiences of wise friends — what one friend was receiving in Switzerland as news and recommendations, versus other friends in different countries, states, and parts of the political spectrum. The tapestry of both news inputs and good sensemaking became key to my attempts to wrap my head around one of the largest global cohort-level conundrums to face humanity to date.

Co-sensing acknowledges the validity and reality of others’ experiences and, by doing so, creates a larger container for your own thinking. We later worked it into a formal architecture for the Hearthland Foundation, where it became part of how the team learns from one another and from the constituents whose lives the foundation’s work is meant to serve.

Co-sensing and beautiful questions are companion practices. The beautiful question is what you bring into the room. Co-sensing is what you do once the question is alive between you, as a shared inquiry. Both require you to slow down enough to actually hear what is said. Both require you to ask from a place of generosity rather than from a place of agenda. Both require that mutual unknowing Nick Cave names — the willingness to come into the conversation without the script of what you already know, and to allow the inquiry to live within and between you.

Your body already knows the difference. If you are asking someone a question with one eye on the clock because you have another meeting to get to, that significantly decreases the probability of asking a generative question. The question gets shaped by the hurry. Beautiful questions require space — the kind of space that holds even the uncomfortable silence where a real answer might form. A capacity for silence and space is crucial. (I think that a capacity to be with space, to be with not knowing and ambiguity, actually allows for the development of an exquisite sense of timing.)

One more turning of this. I have written before about living by vow — about the difference between living from karma, from accumulated patterns and the inertia of past choices, and living from vow, which is the choice to act from a chosen orientation regardless of conditions. Vow is what gives a life shape when conditions are not giving it shape.

I was just listening to a podcast with the Nichiren bishop Myokei Caine-Barrett, who said that vow and question are the same form of words. A vow, she teaches, is not primarily a promise you keep. It is a question that we become. In the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha is described as carrying a single question always: how can I cause all living beings to enter the way? That question is the vow. The vow is the question — and the question is sourced from the profound generosity toward the healing of all beings that is so much a part of Buddhism.

The purpose of a vow, Myokei teaches, is not to earn protection or secure a good rebirth. The purpose of a vow is to transform the one who makes it. I think of the vows I took, and the way the making of them was working me in the months leading up to the vow-making, and even now.

The purpose of the vow is to give one the alchemy that turns poison into medicine. Nichiren wrote from his exile: the icy prison became a crane’s nest. That is what beautiful questions do. They take what would otherwise be only difficulty — a hard year, a broken marriage, a country whose direction terrifies you, a child you have lost, a loss you cannot name — and let you carry it as material and meaning rather than as fate.

A question becomes a vow when you decide to live it long enough that it shapes you. The shaping is the alchemy, and we all know I like a bit of alchemy.

I think this is also why beautiful questions are companion practice to drinking from a deeper well. The shallow wells fill from the rain of urgent questions — the cornering, the inciting, the tactical questions that produce tactical answers. The deeper wells fill from the slow patience of questions you cannot answer in a single sitting. What does it take to keep choosing love? What is mine to do? What in the way I’m living now depletes me, and what is life-giving? What amidst all that is breaking wants to be born that I can attend to? To whom, to whom are we beautiful as we go?

These are Krista’s questions, and Mary Oliver’s, and Hillel’s, and Rumi’s, and Ignatow’s, and Rilke’s, and yours, and mine. These are the questions worth living with, along with a thousand more possibilities if we could but open to them. Questions whose answers we will not arrive at this afternoon. Questions whose shape will keep shaping us as we carry them.

So I find myself asking, of myself and of you: what is the question you are living right now? What is the question you have been afraid to ask?

The question itself is the alchemy, doing its work on us all, unfolding through time.

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Then there are days that arrive in technicolor — spring blossoms, aliveness, almost hyperreal in some sense, the kinds of days that feel like pearls on the string of life, somehow illumined from within. And there are days filled with beautiful unremarkable things — dogs bounding toward you, the release of a new book in a series that has accompanied you for over a decade — and I am content beyond reason. The hours weigh differently from each other, and the weight is not predictable.

There are different wells within your heart. Some fill with each good rain, Others are far too deep for that.

— Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

I keep returning to that line — others are far too deep for that.

When in my life have those wells been fed from some deeper source? I can trace some of the deeper feeding from this past year. The year was painful — more painful than I would have chosen, less painful than I had feared — and it was also full of beauty I had not anticipated. Twenty years ago a Zen teacher said to me, the heart opens both ways. You don’t get the opening to the bliss without the opening to the pain. This past year, I was reaching for the deep wells — Montana with beloved friends, learning biomimicry from Jeanine Benyus while walking the landscape and one unexpected afternoon at a rodeo; Oslo and Costa Rica working with activists, which is soul work for me; Sweden over the holidays with my beloved stepfamily; friends serenading me in bars with I’m gonna wash that man right outta my hair.

The shallow wells fill with a brief shower — the dopamine hit, the doomscroll, the small satisfaction of being right in some corner of an internet filled with dross. They empty just as quickly. The deeper wells are different. They fill from below, from contact with something underground that moves through a different temporal landscape entirely.

John O’Donohue writes of discovering “a spring well gushing forth from beneath the heavy rocks. Such a well has a long biography of darkness and silence. It comes from the heart of the mountain, where no human eye has ever gazed.” There’s a piece of land in the west of Ireland where deep subterranean springs bubble up fresh, branching into streams that nurture the sheep and the soil and all the creatures of the place. I think of that water passing through rock and silt and mud, coming up so fresh that ancient people thought drinking from the spring cured every kind of illness. I’d fill my water bottle and splash the water on my face and neck.

This deep-time source doesn’t depend on what the news cycle brings. Rilke knew that there was some subterranean way to be that would make something else possible: if we surrendered to earth’s intelligence, we could rise up rooted, like trees. Joan Halifax, my teacher, writes that silence and solitude are the very basis of our engagement with the world. Without the surrender, the silence, the solitude, what tends to arise instead is brittle — a fragile thing without the formation that time in the depths forges and shapes in you.

The deeper wells are not all the same.

Some fill through practice. For me, sitting zen, year after year, apprenticing myself to the equanimity of trees. The thing nobody tells you about sitting practice is how slow the going is. You sit, and sit, and sit, and for a long time nothing seems to happen. The body aches. The mind rehearses its grievances. You wonder why you are doing this. And then — sometimes weeks in, sometimes years — you notice that you have stopped reaching for the next thing. The complaining mind has loosened its hold on its preferences. The silence between thoughts has gotten a little bigger. The water has been rising the whole time, and you only just noticed.

Some fill only through friendship — the friend who will give your phone number to a stranger while you hide in a bathroom. The one who comes over to help you pack when you are defeated by the thought of moving. The friend who drags you into Marie’s Crisis Café in New York (my favorite bar in the world, except perhaps for Margaret’s pub in Ballyvaughan) and gets the entire place to serenade you with “I’m gonna wash that man right outta my hair.”

Some fill through encounters with the more-than-human world. Watching elephants in a river in the wild, a mother washing her calf, the unhurried gravity of beings who have never once asked whether they are doing it right. My friend Jennifer’s hands moving sinuously as she tells me about flirting at night, in deep water, with a curious octopus — its arms reaching toward hers, withdrawing, reaching again. To be flirted with by an intelligence so unlike your own is to remember that thinking is bigger than what your species does with it. The well is older than language, and was here before any of us arrived.

Some fill through moments that imprint themselves so deeply in the bones that some part of you is forever left there. I remember years ago swimming alone in a dark lake in the woods of Michigan. So dark that the stars were reflected around me, and it felt like swimming through stars. (I was also irrationally afraid of sharks, which were not in this lake. Apparently leeches are, which I was relieved to learn only after the fact.) I have come to believe that some moments are not entirely metabolized into memory — that they stay, somewhere, intact. That the woman who swam through stars that night is still swimming, and that I can find her there in those waters when I need to remember what it is to be small inside something vast.

Some fill through the beautiful ephemera — a lyric from Andrew Lloyd Webber that passes unbidden through the mind on a Tuesday morning: “sailing off in the skies on a clear blue lake, taking more from this life than I ought to take…”

For my mother, the well is her gardening — bent over the soil, hands in the dirt, the patience of a woman who has watched things grow for decades and who loves the beauty of flowering roses. I love Krista Tippett’s voice on a long drive, or encountering places that evoke Dacher Keltner’s catalog of awe. Walks along the Seine in the spring. A friend who brings the most perfect strawberry. A friend, Valerie, who once welcomed me with open arms and said, these are what arms are for! Wrestling with something hard in good company — and the who of the company mattering more than the wrestling itself.

The deeper wells don’t fill from the doomscroll.

There is a Zen teaching about heaven and hell — that they are not different places, only different ways of inhabiting the same sphere. The way the story was told to me, in heaven you can hear birdsong. In hell you can’t. The birds are still singing. Something in you has stopped being able to listen. I think about this sometimes when I move through the world, to pay conscious attention to birdsong.

I have been in the place where birdsong was unavailable to me. After the 2024 election, I had flashbacks to the long depressive period that followed the first Trump presidency, and I thought, I am not doing this again like that. I couldn’t hear anything, much less birdsong. I was reacting to each awful Cabinet appointment like a blow, waking up each day like a demented ensign running around on the bridge of the Enterprise calling out status alert. This time, I have refused to let what is unfolding interfere with my capacity to be with life — to keep listening, even while seeing what is hard.

The work is not to find another world. The work is to remember which one we are already in. To consciously make space — in a thousand small ways — for contact with what endures.

David Whyte writes, in The Opening of Eyes:

It is Moses in the desert fallen to his knees before the lit bush. It is the man throwing away his shoes as if to enter heaven and finding himself astonished, opened at last, fallen in love with solid ground.

The revelation in the poem is that the astonishment is the recognition: Moses had been walking on holy ground his whole life. The bush did not make the ground holy. The bush made him see what had always been true.

The Zen teacher Norman Fischer calls this binocular vision. In The World Could Be Otherwise, he writes that with one eye we see ordinary people, intractable dilemmas, a troubled world — lacking depth perception. Seeing with depth requires a second eye, the bodhisattva eye. What it sees, I have come to think of as the ordinary extraordinary. Fischer’s claim is that the hope this generates is unconditional — it has nothing to do with what happens or fails to happen. It has to do with the profound nature of being itself.

This is what the deeper wells are for. This life, finally noticed, in full color.

The hours weigh differently from each other, and the weight is unpredictable. The deeper wells fill with such extraordinarily beautiful time. The diving down into the subterranean is worth it. I think our work is to let ourselves be sourced, resourced, so we can root are days in the moments that make everything worth it.

It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world.

— Mary Oliver

Walker, there is no road. The road is made by walking. — Antonio Machado

This is a companion piece to The Invitation to Doubt

Renewing the Orpheus Myth

I just saw Hadestown with the San Francisco cast (the modern retelling of the Orpheus myth) and in it, the Fates circle and taunt: “Who are you to think you can walk a road no one ever walked before?” It’s the internal dog that howls whenever we stand at the edge of something we cannot see the other side of, the insidious voice often beneath insecurity and imposter syndrome.

In the story, Orpheus is a legendary musician whose songs could charm stones and rivers, and he descends to the underworld to retrieve his dead wife Eurydice. Hades agrees to release her on the condition that Orpheus must lead her back to the living world without looking back to see if she follows. He holds his faith through the entire climb toward daylight, and yet within sightline of gaining his aim, doubt reaches up and grabs him. He casts one glance backward, unable to believe in the companionship of love, in being chosen after his beloved turned away, and Eurydice was lost again to the underworld. (For anyone who has ever waited for someone they’re in love with to call them back, imagine that, 1000x worse.)

Orpheus was so very close! What undid him was the doubt that crept in at the very threshold of safety. He could not trust what he could not see, and so his inner demons got him.

And yet Hadestown ends not with the tragedy but with why we keep telling it. “To know how it ends,” Hermes says, “and still begin to sing it again, as if it might turn out this time.” We sing the old songs because the singing itself is the faith, the capacity to believe in the probability that things might turn out better.

I know these voices of doubt. I had this funny moment with my ex-husband when he walked by me, completely preoccupied with something (which was not unusual) and something in me thought, “Did I do something wrong?” We happened to be on a trip with Esther Perel, who said to me, “There’s the little schnur who can wander securely away and explore the world, knowing their mother will be there. There’s the little schnur who will not step away from the mother’s skirts, because their mother said ‘I need you. I’m alone. I’m anxious. Don’t go,’ and cuts off pieces of themselves to stay. And then there’s the one who will still explore anyway, but they always look back to check. You’re the little schnur who looks back.”

Now I’m thinking Orpheus did not have secure attachment! But given myths were orally passed around long before attachment theory, let’s go back to the conversation about faith for a minute.

The Leap from the Lion’s Head

As a girl, one of my favorite movies was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and in particular, I loved the hero’s journey writ large, the path of trials made visible. The final trial before the Grail chamber is a chasm with no visible way across. Indy stands at the edge, consulting his father’s diary, which says, “Only in the leap from the lion’s head will he prove his worth.” He looks across the chasm, and he steps into the void — and lands on a bridge that was always there, invisible because of forced perspective, painted to match the rock face behind it. I’ve thought about this scene for years, and believe in a life of crossing chasms with the sense that the ground will assemble itself beneath one’s feet. (Isn’t that what any form of any true commitment is?)

Years later, I was on a boat with playwright Tom Stoppard — whom I experienced as a consummate gentleman, courtly yet witty — and found out that he was the direct reason for the three trials, for one of my favorite scenes in cinema. The three trials, the penitent man, the name of God, the leap of faith, were his additions to the script. I love that Tom, who was known for his sublime wordplay, gave us one of the simplest and most moving images (I think) of faith to grace the screen in a popular film — to move towards the impossible on a quest, Indy crosses a chasm by stepping into the void, and finds himself surprised to have landed on solid ground.

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote about this in Fear and Trembling, though he never used the phrase we’ve inherited from him. “Leap of faith” is an English compression that came later, in case you ever wondered where that phrase came from. Kierkegaard wrote about the leap and the qualitative transition — the moment when no further reasoning will carry you across, and you must move into a different order of being. Reasoning has run its course, and something else is required, like Indy at the edge of the chasm.

Kierkegaard had Abraham instead of Indy, walking up Mount Moriah with Isaac, asked to do what cannot be reconciled — to sacrifice is only son, to hold both his faith and what every parent’s most terrifying fear is. The leap is not the willingness to sacrifice. That ends up being too unidimensional, too fanatic. The leap is the willingness to keep walking while holding both. Kierkegaard called this the teleological suspension of the ethical — the place where the rules you have lived by no longer guide you, and yet you must move.

I think Orpheus failed this leap, and Abraham made it. Orpheus needed to know. Abraham needed to walk. Both were given an unbearable instruction; one turned around to verify, and the other kept his face toward the mountain. The myths are not telling us that one is virtuous and the other is weak. They are showing us two responses to the same human predicament — to act under conditions where the outcome cannot be confirmed. This is the thing that most fascinates me about all the stories — we know that many of them turn out right in the end. But we don’t get to know that at the outset, and certainly the protagonists do not.

It’s the question every life of any depth eventually asks. Can you walk forward holding what cannot be reconciled?

I want to keep highlighting Abraham for a moment, that this is a different kind of faith, specifically, the faith of motion, of walking, of movement. The Spanish poet Antonio Machado wrote,

Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.
Walker, there is no road. The road is made by walking.

There is no path, no map, no guarantee, no evidence that the road you’re forging will lead anywhere good. And you cannot wait for the road to appear before you start walking. The walking is what makes the path.

Out of South Africa

One of my favorite places to walk, and especially to be guided against a wild landscape, is South Africa. I find South Africa one of the places on earth to land where I have this innate sense that place has much to teach me. Sometimes being situated in the United States, with our complex history of colonialism and racism and civil rights, we can tend to our own exceptionalism. Being in South Africa with its twelve national languages, its incredibly complex history with apartheid, their capacity to work directly with pain through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to construct an architecture of justice like the Constitutional Court built from the bricks of the prison that once held Mandela and Gandhi — all these reframe for me what a country can choose to become, however imperfectly.

Our incredibly generous hosts, Pete and Karin Backwell, not only shared their family, home, and hospitality, but their deep love of such a beautiful and complex country. They introduced me to Marius Swart, a guide who could read the landscape so well that we would stop a speeding jeep to look at tiny insect cocoon, and his wisdom with the wildlife such that we could track elephants on foot and stay safe when confronted with young, marauding bulls. This encounter with the more-than-human world — one in which I’m completely convinced I would probably die amidst left to my own devices — woke something in me. I felt some senses come alive only in that landscape – of learning to see shapes, shadows, form in different ways.

Pete and Karin once arranged for me to visit the Cradle of Humankind, a UNESCO World Heritage Site where some of the oldest hominid fossils on earth have been found. To stand in that landscape and know that somewhere, someone in my mitochondria knew this place as home — that all our lineages, this complex family that is all human beings, trace back to this ground — made me bow my head. I remember standing at this low rise just looking out across sun-baked land and feeling a sense of faith, faith in the long arc, faith in what we share beneath the noise of what divides us.

And I think all our movements are deeply entwined, and here, I’ll dip into social justice and civil rights as movements, beyond just the ways our pathways and walking steps entwine.

Christo Brand was eighteen, an Afrikaner farm boy, when he was assigned as a prison guard on Robben Island. Nelson Mandela was sixty. The system that put them in that room together was designed to make sure nothing passed between them — no recognition, no conversation that wasn’t an order. My family and I had brunch with Christo in Cape Town and listened to him describe what it was like to watch a man, year after year, hold onto something invisible and quite possibly impossible. He told us that over time, despite himself, he came to believe in what Mandela believed in.

In the quarry where prisoners were forced to do hard, toxic labor, there is a shallow cave dug into the wall that also serves as their latrine. Our guide joked that political strategy meetings were held there because it was a “non-whites-only” latrine. It was in that cave that Mandela met with Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, and Ahmed Kathrada to debate approaches to liberation, to teach younger prisoners about history and politics and strategy. The limestone blinded Mandela’s eyes over time, but in those bleak conditions of hard labor, the moral and political foundations of South African democracy were forged.

I think of Mandela growing his prison garden, fighting for years just to get permission for that small patch of earth. He removed rocks from soil that had been built over a garbage dump, collected ostrich droppings for fertilizer on the way to the quarry, shared his vegetables with guards and fellow prisoners alike. He hid pages of his autobiography in cocoa tins buried in that garden to be smuggled out. “A garden was one of the few things in prison that one could control,” he wrote. “To plant a seed, watch it grow, to tend it and then harvest it, offered a simple but enduring satisfaction.” There was a Sotho saying Mandela often quoted: Moaha moriti ha adule — plant trees for others. He planted with no guarantee he would ever see the harvest.

Mandela wrote in Long Walk to Freedom: “I am fundamentally an optimist. Whether that comes from nature or nurture, I cannot say. Part of being optimistic is keeping one’s head pointed toward the sun, one’s feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lays defeat and death.”

This was the leap Orpheus could not make. In the dark of the underworld, he could not trust what he could not verify. He needed the evidence of his eyes. Mandela had only faith — and somehow, in the midst of those dark moments, he kept walking. As he walked out the prison gate toward freedom, he knew that if he didn’t leave his bitterness and hatred behind, he’d still be in prison.

Albie Sachs lost his right arm and the sight in one eye to a car bomb planted by South African security forces in Maputo in 1988. Lying in a London hospital recovering, he received a note from a friend that read: We will avenge you. He found himself uncomfortable with it. “We’re going to cut off the arms of the people who did this?” he asked. “Are we going to blind them in one eye?” Out of that discomfort came what he later called soft vengeance: “Hard vengeance leaves you still at the level of the people who did these awful things. Soft vengeance is the triumph of your life, of your ideals, of your goals.” Years later, the man who orchestrated the bombing came to Albie’s chambers at the Constitutional Court. They talked for hours, and at the end, Albie told him, “Normally when I say goodbye I shake hands. I can’t shake your hand. Go to the Truth Commission, tell them what you know, and who knows, maybe one day we’ll meet again.” Months later at a party, the man — Henry — found him through the crowd. He had gone to the Commission and told them everything. “I put out my left hand and shook his hand,” Albie said. “I almost fainted.” Henry went home and cried for two weeks. (I cried when I first encountered this story.)

I was carrying one of Albie’s books when I met him, and so nervous I dropped it.

These were people who kept walking when there was no road, who kept faith alive in impenetrable darkness, who against considerable odds did not become what they were fighting against.

Hope for the Future, Yes, and Even for the Past

The poet David Ray, writing after Frost, offers a stranger form of faith — retrospective faith, the willingness to look at the past wholly, regrets and wreckage included, without letting it burden the present.

Do you have hope for the future? someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end. Yes, and even for the past, he replied, that it will turn out to have been all right for what it was, something we can accept, mistakes made by the selves we had to be, not able to be, perhaps, what we wished…

Faith extending backwards and forwards both. There’s something quietly radical in trusting that what already happened will turn out to have been all right — alongside trust that what’s coming will too. It lifts the burden of attachment to outcome. It trusts that some thread runs through, or that the running-through doesn’t need to be visible to be real. This is a kind of freedom.

Freedom is why I became a psychologist in the first place. I was thinking lately on old tethers. (There’s nothing like being newly single at 50 with the bodily shifts of menopause to bring up all the ridiculousness of your adolescence, except theoretically from a more secure place with more access to perspective. Theoretically.) There’s an old story that arose in the uncertainty of my teenage years, growing up Chinese in America. I notice myself deflecting evidence, qualifying compliments, unable to fully believe sometimes when someone communicates something complimentary and loving. The belief underneath goes something like, “If I let myself fully believe I am loved or seen, and then someone leaves, I have no armor. If I step fully onto the bridge and it isn’t there, I fall.” The protective system says, “Don’t believe this fully. Stay a little uncertain. Keep your guard up.” But that just does not seem like I way I want to go through life.

I’ve come to think of it in Star Trek terms (because why not?), from all those scenes where the captain calls for full power to the forward shields. Shields keep threats out, but they also keep experience from entering and being metabolized. Over time I’ve come to trust the hull instead (the upside of 50) — the resilience of body and spirit to weave wounds into scar tissue. The shields don’t have to be up all the time, because the hull is stronger than I once believed. A teacher of mine said at the painful beginning of my last divorce, “When you are through this, you will find something unshakeable in you,” and I am just now beginning to feel my way into that. Louisa May Alcott wrote in Little Women, “I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.”

These protective systems are old, born of survival-level doubt from a time when I wasn’t very resourced, again pre-verbal. But there is another force, the one I’ve come to call the anyways — acting from vow regardless of outcome, stepping into chasms before any bridge is visible. The protective system and the faith coexist. The work is less about making the doubt go away and more about right-sizing it against a larger window, letting faith have more of the vote, walking forward even while the internal dog howls.

Faith is essential to doubt, just as doubt is essential to faith. They are the two feet we walk on. The doubt essential to faith — Lesley Hazleton’s territory — is the willingness to hold uncertainty about belief. To doubt well is to stay curious, open, unfinished. The faith essential to doubt is parallel and related. It’s the willingness to stay open while doubting, to let in love while bracing for loss, to act while uncertain, to walk while there is no road.

This is what working with activists have taught me. This is what walking the wild landscapes of South Africa taught me. This is what love and loss have taught me. Faith is not the absence of doubt. Faith is what you do anyway.

Rilke wrote a sonnet to Orpheus that closes the circle this piece opened — Orpheus once more, this time as the one who keeps singing. I love this piece so much that I want to close with it — to end with the immediacy of being “a ringing glass that shatters as it rings”, exactly as it was made to do, and to add oneself gladly to all that has been before and will be and cancel the cost.

Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened.
like winter, which even now is passing.
For beneath the winter is a winter so endless
that to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.

Be forever dead in Eurydice, and climb back singing.
Climb praying as you return to connection.
Here among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient,
be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.

Be. And, at the same time, know what it is not to be.
The non-being inside you allows you to vibrate
in full resonance with your world. Use it for once.

To all that has run its course, and to the vast unsayable
numbers of beings abounding in Nature,
add yourself gladly, and cancel the cost.

trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

The Doubt Essential to Faith

I met my friend Lesley Hazleton at a panel on the future of news in an age of social media, probably some 15 years ago. Everyone else on the panel was rather professional, sipping water, dressed in suits. Lesley was at the end nursing what looked like a glass of whiskey, an unlit cigarette, and clearly had no patience for fools. I loved her and followed her around for the rest of the conference.

On April 29, 2024, I received a letter from her — posthumous, because that was so Lesley, who absolutely did not want to deal with the fuss people would make if they knew what she sat on for months, that she was dying. “Yes, this is a goodbye letter,” she wrote, “which is difficult for me, because as many of you know, I’m lousy at saying goodbye. I’m the one who slips out of the room sideways with a vague wave of the hand.”

But a vague wave of the hand wasn’t going to cut it this time, so she wrote to us all — bad news, good news, and even better news, she said — asking that we be glad for her. Because she was. “I’ve been a pro-choice feminist for over six decades, so it should come as no surprise that I’ll be exercising choice in this too.” She used Washington State’s Death With Dignity Act. By the time I read her words, she was already gone, which both really pissed me off and made me laugh because it was so her. I was told she died painlessly and peacefully, after looking around, seeing baby ducks come around the corner of her houseboat dock, and her last words were, “this is nice.”

As a Jewish writer who lived in Jerusalem for thirteen years, Lesley wrote about Islam with the rigor of a scholar and also a deep love. Her TED talk, “The Doubt Essential to Faith,” remains one of the most viewed talks on religion ever recorded. From her, I got the idea that doubt is actually foundational and essential to faith — that great faith can hold great doubt, and indeed that faith without doubt is brittle extremism.

She used to talk about what kept her awake for five years while writing her biography of Muhammad. What actually happened one desert night, half a world away and centuries ago, on the night in the year 610 when Muhammad received the first revelation of the Quran on a mountain outside Mecca? This is the core mystical moment of Islam — and as such, of course, it defies empirical analysis. But she read the earliest sources anyway. And what struck her was not what happened but what didn’t.

He didn’t come floating off the mountain as though walking on air, nor did he run down shouting hallelujah. There were no choirs of angels, no elation, no golden aura. He was terrified, thoroughly convinced he was going mad, possibly possessed by a jinn. His first impulse was to throw himself off a cliff. He fled down the mountain. He questioned his own sanity. He buried his head in his wife’s lap. He needed his wife Khadija to reassure him that what he’d experienced was real.

For Lesley, this is what made him trustworthy. A man who immediately claimed certainty would be suspect. A man who doubted — who trembled under the weight of what he couldn’t fully understand — was someone you could believe.

The same pattern appears across tradition: Moses at the burning bush, arguing with God about his own inadequacy, the disciples after the resurrection, not believing what they saw, Jesus himself at the Garden of Gethsemane, Buddha advising his followers not to accept teachings merely out of reverence for the teacher but to verify them for themselves.

The Desert Teaches

Lesley knew the desert. Before she became the “accidental theologist” writing biographies of Muhammad and Mary and Jezebel, she spent a year in the Sinai and Negev — sleeping in Bedouin camps, burrowing into dunes to wait out sandstorms in what she called “a state of excited tranquillity.” She wrote in Where Mountains Roar about the fear of being lost that rises to consciousness in the desert, how “it seems to me that it is not physical death we fear in the desert so much as death of the soul.”

Years later, she would write that to lose one’s way, whether on the road or in life, is to be rendered open to the unknown, with none of the usual safeguards of familiarity. It is to be vulnerable. And those who are most terrified of being lost tend to be those who are most judgmental about it.

The desert strips things down. So does doubt.

When I visited her houseboat on Lake Union in Seattle, she would make sage tea on the deck — “Mariam’s plant,” she called it. In Arabic, sage is maramiya, named for the Virgin Mary. The legend says that while Mary and the infant Jesus were fleeing King Herod, she rested beneath a sage bush, wiped her face with its leaves, and was revived by the scent. Mary blessed the plant: “Till eternity, you will be a blessed plant.” The Latin name, salvia, shares a root with salvation — to help, to save, to heal.

Lesley wrote a whole gorgeous book about mythological Mary as an herbalist, a village healer who mixed remedies with her grandmother and passed those skills to her son. Serving sage tea was her way of honoring Mariam. We’d sit on the deck and feed the ducks while she talked about paradox and fundamentalism and why she loved tuk-tuks and why she still wanted to learn to fly helicopters. “You trust,” she wrote, “and that is always a risk. But how boring and lonely a life in which nothing is ever risked.”

The Muscle We Risk Losing

Lesley used to argue that fundamentalism is what happens when doubt dies — when people become so certain of their rightness that they become righteous, unable to see the humanity in those who disagree. She watched it happen across traditions, the wars waged to say that my god is better than your god, my god granted me this land, these resources, these faculties, for the purposes of dominion over, and our priests are to be unquestioned in their power and authority.

“We’ve allowed Judaism to be claimed by violently messianic West Bank settlers,” she said in her TED talk, with quiet rage, “Christianity by homophobic hypocrites and misogynistic bigots, Islam by suicide bombers. This isn’t faith. This is fanaticism.”

Whenever I visit Washington, D.C., I like to walk to the Lincoln Memorial, which is one of the great temples to democracy, to liberty. (Plus, I really miss having an articulate President who holds a capacity for scholarship, nuance, and wisdom. The contrast between his words and Trump’s tweets is deeply painful.) Lincoln wrote in his Second Inaugural address which is inscribed in stone on the memorial, “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered ~ that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”

I’ve been thinking lately about how doubt functions as a kind of cognitive muscle — one we can strengthen or let atrophy — and I continue to go back to how we cannot let our cognitive muscles atrophy in an age of AI. Recent research from the Wharton School found that nearly 80% of participants followed AI-generated advice even when it was demonstrably wrong — what the researchers call “cognitive surrender.” But perhaps more disturbing: participants’ confidence went up when they had AI access, even though the system was feeding them wrong answers half the time. They borrowed the machine’s certainty without checking its accuracy. The subjective experience of using AI was that they were doing better, even as the errors piled on.

I find this profoundly disturbing, not because AI is uniquely dangerous, but because it falls in line with an age-old pattern that has led to the rise of fascism in the past — the way that a teacher, a tradition, a charismatic leader, an algorithm, becomes something we outsource our sense of morality to. The moment we stop asking whether something is true and simply accept it because it came from a trusted source, we’ve handed over something precious.

I think Lesley would have seen this as fundamentalism by another name, the death of doubt dressed up as efficiency, the arrogance of certainty, now automated.

In her goodbye letter, Lesley wrote that she was experiencing “an unexpected but wonderfully bearable lightness of being. Not a sad feeling of saying goodbye to life, but one of joy and amazement at how great it’s been. And of immense gratitude.” She described a life of “saying yes: yes to experience, yes to new ideas, yes to what seems to be the impossible.”

That willingness to say “yes” without knowing what comes next is that’s the disposition she argued was essential to faith. “Without the willingness to find yourself lost,” she wrote, “you won’t make mistakes, but you won’t make discoveries either.”

The willingness to not know, to sit with uncertainty, to let questions live longer than our impatience wants them to — I think this is the beginning of wisdom. I love what Rilke says in his Letters to a Young Poet,

The invitation here is to practice doubt. Let’s not do the corrosive, cynical, perpetually-determined-to-be-disappointed-by-life form of doubt that solely exists as a protective mechanism, but the kind of doubt that makes us open, curious, porous, the kind of doubt that can ask, “How could I be wrong?” and “What do I not know about this situation?” This doubt that leaves room for the world to surprise you. “What is usual is not what is always” is one of my very favorite Jane Hirschfield lines.

Where certainty terrifies me, Lesley said, uncertainty seems to touch the best of what is human in us.

May your unknowing bring out wide spaces for wonder and beauty and the beautifully unexpected to emerge into your life amidst the hard.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep.

— Rumi (trans. Coleman Barks)

The door is round and open. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. What are those worlds touching? I imagine the worlds are of waking and dreaming, of inner and outer, of the sacred and the ordinary, of this life and whatever lies beyond, of our individual selves and into communion. I love another way of considering this all, too, which is that we ourselves are the threshold, we are where experience external to us is made into interiority; where sensemaking happens and then is spun back out into the world again as attention and will. The door is round and open because we are round and open, if we let ourselves be. All too often, we’re not, we anchor ourselves strongly as denizens of one or the other. And the invitation in the poem is repeated three times like a bell: don’t go back to sleep, because it’s so easy to fade back into habituation and unconsciousness.

I love the language and poetry of open doors. A friend told me recently that I was a little obsessed with doorways and he was not wrong! I adored The Sound of Music as a child. I think I still know every line and every song. (It does not take much to get me to start in with, “How do you solve a problem like Maria?”) There's a line where Mother Abbess tells Maria, "When the Lord closes a door, somewhere He opens a window." I quite possibly took this more literally than intended in this life.

I am the person who, when invited to wander tests the door handles of public buildings and goes down random hallways, inviting alleys, and beckoning staircases just to see where they lead. I was prowling around Newnham College, Cambridge UK, recently, down a gorgeous flower-lined path and tested the door handle that ended up leading into a science lab for women built in the 1800s, and discovered a rehearsal hall where I shamelessly eavesdropped on people singing. What a gift to hear these voices, to be stopped in wonder at the unexpected! What would I have missed if I hadn't tried the handle, just to see?

The word “liminal” comes from the Latin limen — threshold. The anthropologist Victor Turner I think made it more widespread in the twentieth century, but the insight and concept is ancient. Van Gennep described the three phases of initiation as Severance, Threshold, Return. The middle phase — the Threshold — he called “the fallow chaos.” It is the time when the boundaries of the self are tested and broken, when we are no longer who we were and not yet who we are becoming. (This makes me think of butterflies and of imaginal cells!)

The Romans understood this so deeply that they assigned a goddess to guard their hinges and doorframes: Cardea, protector of the threshold, keeper of that charged border between safety and danger, known and unknown. A bride was carried across to keep evil spirits from slipping through. Cultures around the world have buried sacred objects beneath their doorways, hung prayers beside them, stationed guardian figures at their entries — from the mezuzah to Janus, the two-faced god who looked both backward and forward, the only Roman deity with no Greek counterpart, because the Romans intuited that the doorway itself needed its own god.

Every threshold carries risk. That’s why the crossing matters.

John O’Donohue was a very dear friend to my ex-husband, and beautifully writes about thresholds. He traces the word “threshold” back to “threshing” — the act of separating grain from husk. A threshold, he writes, is “a place where you move into more critical and challenging and worthy fullness.” It becomes more than a crossed line. It becomes a place where something falls away so something else can emerge, sometimes only visible once you have crossed it. Finding new doorways, crossing into that hallway at Newnham lab, I encountered a singing that I didn’t know would be there, a world that was otherwise unavailable and invisible to me, and I was available to be surprised by it.

John O’Donohue writes, “A threshold is a line which separates two territories of spirit. And I think that, very often, how we cross is the key thing.” This made me think there are so many ways to cross thresholds. We can cross them hesitantly, testing each step, or we can throw oneself across the threshold almost heedlessly or recklessly or with abandon, or walk through announced with fanfare and bugles and greeted with cheers, or slipping past silently to listen into what lies ahead.

He names how suddenly we can find ourselves standing in a different world. You can be in the midst of your evening with fifty things to do, and the phone rings with news that someone you love is dying. I’ve been both on the giving and receiving end of those calls. “But when you put the phone down, you are already standing in a different world.” The solid ground we thought was there dissolves. One of my favorite lines by Naomi Shihab Nye, from her gorgeous poem on “Kindness” says, “feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.”

“If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much that you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.” — Clarissa Pinkola Estés

I love these lines. I found them in my late 20s, a time when the yearning for a sane life was waxing, and I wanted to find these doors wrought of experience, wounding, love, and longing. I love that these too are thresholds, the kind we can stand at forever wondering if it’s too hard or too risky on the other side….or we can walk through. We have choice.

And yet I wonder if the literal and the metaphorical aren’t as separate as they seem. The willingness to try a door handle — to see what’s down that hallway, to follow curiosity even when you don’t know where it leads — might be the same muscle we need for the deeper doors, because it’s impossible to know what’s on the other side of those doors too. And often, opening those doors is quite messy!

On pilgrimage in Japan last fall, my teacher Roshi Joan Halifax thoroughly encouraged us pilgrims to “aimlessly prowl” — walking until the one who is “achieving pilgrimage” falls away, opening to the gifts of unfolding suchness (the particular nature of things) through the act of prowling. (She didn’t quite frame it that way, but that’s what I took away from it.) It’s so fun to prowl in Japan — to find the tiny perfect bar, tucked in what looked like a private courtyard, with an amazing bartender who made exquisite and unique craft cocktails, or to follow a path in the dark that opens up to a suburban shrine wildly dedicated to cats where neighborhood children have put up their drawings and sketches of felines.

In the Buddhist tradition, one of the Three Doors of Liberation is aimlessness — apraṇihita. It sounds counterintuitive, as I can imagine one wondering, “how can aimlessness be a door?” But Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us that, “We meditate not to attain enlightenment, because enlightenment is already in us.” The wave only need remember that it is already water, the door we’re trying so hard to find may already be open. We may already be through it. Aimlessness is the interior attitude (or lack therof) towards some concept of not-arrival; instead letting the experiencing and the encountering to arise.

John O’Donohue wrote something about the strangeness of encounter, which goes back to why we fundamentally need one another as human beings. He says, “Here am I, sitting in front of you now, looking at your face, you’re looking at mine, and yet neither of us have ever seen our own faces.” Every person is a threshold we can never fully cross, in whom we will never experience ourselves again alike in someone else, every meeting a door whose other side remains invisible to us. We cannot see our own faces, and we cannot fully enter another person’s interiority — and yet in the encounter itself, in that space between, something unique and peculiar to the uniqueness of each human opens.

Which brings me back to Rumi’s doorsill. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. We are both the ones crossing and the threshold being crossed. We are the place where the external becomes internal, and vice versa, where sensemaking happens, and then is spun back out into the world as attention and will, and the world feeds itself back to our senses.

In the spirit of invitation, I invite you to consider, what doors are you standing at? What handles haven’t you tried? What thresholds lie in front of you?

And what singing might you find — what territory of spirit — if you simply walked through?

Don’t go back to sleep.

A couple of decades ago, I picked up the telephone and called a woman named Karen Aarons because someone told me to – Karen who I’d never met, and still don’t know who she is or what she does – but she said one thing to me that I’ve never forgotten. “Your longing must become so strong that you forget who is longing and for what.”

That is a hell of a koan.

There is a strange grammar to longing. It is always for — for something, for someone, for a life not yet lived, for a world not yet made, to be seen, to be met. Longing is directional, tensed toward the future, hungry.

Kabir, the 15th-century mystic, said, “When the Guest is being searched for, it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work.” Karen’s teaching echoes Kabir, suggesting that the direction is not the point. What matters is the intensity, what matters is following longing so far that you forget the object—and then what remains is the longing itself, become everything. And in the intervening years since that telephone call, I’ve noticed my longing and my relationship to it, the places I’ve curtailed it in myself, the ways I’m sometimes afraid of it.

What I’ve noticed is that most people pull back before they let the full unfolding of the longing itself play out. They (and I) pull back because they have learned or been taught, somewhere along the way, that longing is dangerous, that to want something fully is to court disappointment, that it is better to want less, to expect less, to need less—because then you cannot be hurt as badly when it doesn’t come. They tell themselves they don’t deserve it anyway, or that it isn’t realistic, or somehow above them, or that the longing is too much, too embarrassing, too exposed, too earnest, too naive, too raw, too wanting. Sometimes to be an immigrant is to arrive in place with all the longing and possibility of a new, full life, and the work edicts and ethics to make it possible, and also all the cautions meant to keep you safe from an unsafe world.

And so they – we – I – trim it down. We make it manageable, temper our expectations, train ourselves not to want, distract ourselves from the discomfort of wanting that is so wholly a part of the human experience.

A longtime colleague and Grail-legend expert, Randall Benson, once told me what happens to those who refuse the call to adventure. (I love having friends who are experts in Arthurian legend!) We were tromping around the freezing woods of Nebraska, retracing parts of the Lewis and Clark trail in the dead of winter when he tells me, “those who do not heed the call to adventure end up leading a life of constant adaptation to diminishment.”

Oh fuck, no. No, no. No. Even my late 20s self rebelled against that. No. I reeled in horror at the time, and I still do. This was absolutely not the fate I wanted for myself. A life of constant adaptation to diminishment. What a phrase! Shrinking the size of your wants to fit within the size of your circumstances. Making peace with less and less and less. Calling it maturity. Calling it realism.

I don’t think it is actually any of those things. I wonder if instead it is refusal, the slow death of the soul that happens when you stop letting yourself want.

Have you heard me say “no” enough? No. No, to smallness.

(To be clear, this is definitely NOT a “no” to the small things, like the cup of tea, the evening in bed, the longing for walking by a cherry tree in bloom. I want to clearly note that these small things are the wondrous things that make life living. My fantasies right now are very simple — to make a cup of tea in my kitchen, to carry it to my living room, and to curl up on my own couch with a book. This is in part because while I’m alternatively grateful, bemused, and boggled to be living with my parents again, a “room of one’s own” Virginia Woolf-style is very much a current longing!)

From an old essay I’ve loved for decades, D.M. Dooling’s “The Spirit of Quest” — “How terrible to think of not being the hero of one’s own life; this is the role for which each of us is cast, no matter how unsuccessfully we play it. And if the part seems too big, if we picture the hero as being indeed ‘more than life-sized’, it is because our daily life has dwindled, become less than real, and only pygmy proportions seem natural to us.”

James Hollis starkly writes, “Of each critical juncture of choice, one may usefully ask: ‘Does this path enlarge or diminish me?’ Usually, we know the answer to that question. We know it intuitively, instinctively, in the gut.” We know. I think we do know when we are choosing diminishment. We know when we are making ourselves small to avoid the risk of reaching. We feel it in the body, in the subtle contraction, the tightening around the heart, in the justifying language we find ourselves relating to friends. Hollis says, “Each morning the twin gremlins of fear and lethargy sit at the foot of our bed and smirk. Fear of further departure, fear of the unknown, fear of the challenge of largeness intimidates us back into our convenient rituals, conventional thinking, and familiar surroundings.”

The challenge of largeness is what longing asks of us. It asks us to be large enough to hold the wanting, large enough to risk the disappointment, large enough to stay at the edge of the flame, large enough to contain and transmute the inevitable heartbreak, to accumulate the harms and hurts without becoming closed or bitter, to still say, “yes”.

Parker Palmer writes of people who refused to conspire in their own diminishment—Rosa Parks among them. He notes that they came to understand “that no punishment anyone might inflict on them could possibly be worse than the punishment they inflict on themselves by conspiring in their own diminishment.” I’ve done this. I’m done with this. I’m done conspiring in my own diminishment. I’ll undoubtedly do it again, and need to be reminded anew as I am by good friends to give myself a good shake.

Rilke knew this place of longing. In The Book of Hours, he wrote, “My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing.” We human beings, caught between heaven and earth, on this bridge (as Lucille Clifton puts it) between starshine and clay, we get to find out what happens when we stop trying to manage it, contain it, redirect it—and instead let it consume us entirely. The poets know this place. My friend Father David McCallum introduced me to Goethe’s “The Holy Longing”,

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
because the mass man will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive, what longs to be burned to death.
In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
a strange feeling comes over you,
when you see the silent candle burning.
Now you are no longer caught in the obsession with darkness,
and a desire for higher love-making sweeps you upward.
Distance does not make you falter.
Now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.
And so long as you haven’t experienced this:
to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.

I will not be a troubled guest. I love instead Mary Oliver’s, “all my life I was a bride married to amazement.” It is the willingness to be consumed by what you reach for, to be unmade by the reaching itself. What else is left at the end of a life? I had a beautiful coach who died years ago named James Baye, who passed away long before his time in an accident in Joshua Tree. But he said something to me once that has guided the living of my own life. He said that at the end of his life there would be nothing left to miss because there would have been nothing left to give.

When he died, I had the oddest conviction this was the case, that he found a way to have given everything as he lay dying. Nothing left ungiven. In the wake of his going, I felt visited by the firm conviction that a situation I was in was not the right thing for me, and the utter surety that he would have wanted more for me gave me the courage to lift my head and say, “Not this.”

Virginia Woolf wrote, “Across the broad continent of a woman’s life falls the shadow of a sword.” On the one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where all is correct. But on the other side of that sword, if you’re crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, ‘all is confusion. Nothing follows a regular course.’ Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a far more interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will also be more perilous.” (quoted from Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, Eat, Pray, Love)

I will take the perilous. I will certainly take it any day over the diminishment. Plus it seems more fun.

I just left a gathering of dear friends, colleagues, community, beloveds. These aren’t normally words one would use to refer to one’s consulting firm, but Cultivating Leadership isn’t any consulting firm. Emceeing the final day, the day when all the departures are happening, I said, “Stay… stay until you go.”

So obvious, and yet I’ve also been prone to the Irish goodbye, of going too soon. This life asks this of us, to stay, to really abide, before we go. And believe me, given my fundamental ambivalence about this whole being born thing sometimes, it has been a struggle to stay.

Love of this world, this place, the beauty of it, the resilience that rises in the face of the unfathomable, the people in it, keeps me here. Michael Meade writes: “For each soul is bound to love in ways that help reveal the longing carried in the depths of the soul... All attempts at loving help to reveal something of the design hidden in the heart, that whispers in the blood, and sings in the soul. In the end it turns out that there were no small lives, only people too hung up with the worries of the little self or too afraid to follow the thread of existence all the way.”

The people who lead lives of constant adaptation to diminishment are the ones who stopped following the thread, who let go when it got hard, who decided that wanting was too painful and settled for something smaller, something safer.

One of my Cultivating Leadership work colleagues, Zand Craig, brought me an acorn from Plum Village, Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastery in France. While sitting on a meditation platform under the oaks, the acorns fell around him, plinking softly onto the platform. It reminds me of a teaching I encountered through Elizabeth Gilbert, attributed to Zen, which pleases me given my path as a Zen chaplain,

They say an oak tree is brought into creation by two forces at the same time. Obviously, there is the acorn from which it all begins, the seed which holds all the promise and potential, which grows into the tree. Everybody can see that. But only a few can recognize that there is another force operating here as well—the future tree itself, which wants so badly to exist that it pulls the acorn into being, drawing the seedling forth with longing out of the void, guiding the evolution from nothingness to maturity. In this respect, say the Zens, it is the oak tree that creates the very acorn from which it was born.

I love the idea of the invisible, invitational force from the future, that in a sense, longing is a force that moves in both directions—not only the self straining toward what it wants but the wanted thing calling us into itself.

I have kept the acorn from Plum Village in my purse, occasionally reaching in to touch the smooth shape of it. I don’t know if it will ever be planted, if it will ever become the tree that wanted so badly to exist. But I think of it sometimes—that small hard thing, holding inside itself not only the memory of the tree it came from but the pull of the tree it might yet become. And I think, that is what longing feels like. Being held between what was and what could be, drawn forward by something that does not yet exist but already, in some sense, is.

Carl Jung wrote: “The roots of all our neurosis lie here, in the conflict between the longing for growth and freedom and our incapacity or refusal to pay the price in suffering of the kind which challenges the supremacy of the ego’s demands. This is the crux of the matter.”

This inverts everything we think we know about desire. We think longing is what we endure until we get what we want. We think it is the price we pay, the uncomfortable waiting room before the prize.

The Jesuit priest Father Gregory Boyle puts it simply: “All human longing and desire is just love trying to happen.” If that is true, which I believe it is, then to go fully into longing—to let it become so strong you forget who is longing and for what—is to let love finally have you, love not as the thing you get, but the unmaking, the dissolution, the thing you become when you stop holding back, requited or not.

The Portuguese have a word for this: saudade. (I love words we don’t have words for in English.) Anthony De Sa describes it: “A longing for something so indefinite as to be indefinable. Love affairs, miseries of life, the way things were, people already dead, those who left and the ocean that tossed them on the shores of a different land—all things born of the soul that can only be felt.” Saudade is not for a specific thing. It is longing that has outgrown its object, that has become a way of being in the world, open and alive and unafraid of being on that keen, frothy edge of both unknowing and welcoming whatever comes.

This is what Karen Aarons was pointing to. When longing becomes so strong you forget who is longing and for what, it stops being about lack, what you don’t have, what you can’t possess (as though we could ever really possess anything anyway). It becomes presence, the way you are with the world rather than waiting for the world to give you something.

I think about the people I have known who pulled back, who decided the longing was too much, who made themselves smaller to avoid the risk of reaching and failing. And I think about the phrase that made me reel in horror, the thought of a life of constant adaptation to diminishment. Rilke wrote, “I can only measure the world in terms of longing.”

What would it mean to measure our lives this way? Not by what we achieved or acquired but by what we dared to want, by how far we let ourselves reach, by whether we followed the thread of existence all the way—into the flame, into the transformation, into the becoming that only happens when the self stops holding itself apart.

In my purse is the acorn from Plum Village, small and hard and full of a future that may never come. But it was pulled from a tree by gravity, and carried to me via a hand of friendship. And I think, that is also how longing works. It moves through us. It uses our hands. It draws the future into being, seedling by seedling, one small weight after another, falling toward something that wants so badly to exist.

“Your longing must become so strong you forget who is longing and for what.”

And then what? Maybe that’s the adventure.

Ending with an offering of one of my very favorite poems about the ephemeral and longing.

On the Quiet Proofs of Love
by Samuel Hazo

Don’t wait for definitions
I’ve had
my fill of aftertalk
and overtalk, of meanings that don’t
mean, of words not true
enough to be invisible, of all
those Januaries of the mind when
everything that happens happens
from the eyebrows up.
If truth
is in the taste and not
the telling, give me whatever
is and cannot be again —
like sherbet on the tongue, like love...
Paris defined is Paris
lost, but Paris loved
is always Orly in the rain,
broiled pork and chestnuts
near the Rue de Seine,
the motorcade that sped de Gaulle
himself through Montparnasse.
Viva
the fool who said “show me
a man who thinks, I’ll show
you a man who frowns.”
Which
reminds me on Andrew,
learning to count by twos and asking,
“where is the end of the counting?”
Let’s settle for the salt and pepper
of the facts.
Oranges don’t parse,
and no philosopher can translate
shoulders in defeat, or how
it feels when luck’s slim arrow
stops at you, or why lovemaking’s
not itself until it’s made.
Let’s breathe like fishermen who sit
alone together on a dock
and let the wind do all the talking.
That way we’ll see
that who we are is what
we’ll be hereafter.
We’ll learn
the bravery of trees that cannot
know “the dice of God
are always loaded.”
We’ll think of life as one long kiss,
since talk and kisses never mix.
We’ll watch the architecture
of the clouds create themselves
like flames and disappear like laughter

One of my very favorite poets, Rainer Maria Rilke was caught in this in-between place and wrote so beautifully from it, tortured poet that he was. In The Book of Hours, he wrote these favored lines which I sometimes say to myself as prayer in sacred spaces,

I am too alone in the world, yet not alone enough

to make each hour holy.

I am too small in the world, yet not small enough

to be simply in your presence, like a thing—

just as it is.

I’ve felt so often caught between the this and the that, too connected and engaged to disappear into contemplation, too small sometimes against the scale of what the world sometimes feels like it needs.

And yet.

In a letter explaining his life’s work on the Duino Elegies, Rilke said, “All the worlds of the universe plunge into the Invisible as into a yet deeper reality. Certain stars increase in intensity and extinguish themselves in the angels’ endless awareness. Others move toward transformation slowly and with great effort, and their next self-realization occurs in fear and terror. We are the transformers of Earth. Our whole being, and the flights and falls of our love, enable us to undertake this task.” In the same letter, he offered this glorious metaphor for what we’re on about – “We are the bees of the Invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the Invisible.” This is part of why I call my work “minding the invisible”, this strange vocation of gathering the seen and felt and tasted, the experiences of this life that we co-create, and carry it—transmuted—into what cannot be seen. This is small, steady, cumulative work, best done in company.

John Paul Lederach, who has spent his life in the practice of peacebuilding, offers another visual metaphr, being the “critical yeast” of systems. I’ve come out of Silicon Valley with its language of scale, and movement-building concerned with mass, the numbers that count, the tipping point, the groundswell, and against that, John Paul suggests we’ve missed something. “The critical mass in fact was asking what initial, even small, things made exponentially greater things possible.”

Like so many COVID-era householders, I turned out some impressive loaves of gorgeous sourdough, learning the feel of the rise by hand.

Yeast is the smallest ingredient in bread, and it is the only one that makes the rest grow. “Smallness has nothing to do with the size of potential change,” John Paul writes. “What you look for is the quality of what happens if certain sets of people get mixed. The principle of yeast is this: A few strategically connected people have greater potential for creating the social growth of an idea or process than large numbers of people who think alike.”

Yeast has its own timing. Mixed directly into the mass too quickly, it dies. It needs warmth first, moisture, a small protected space to begin its own growth before it can leaven anything else. And then it must be kneaded—thoroughly worked into the whole, and the leavening happens invisibly, in waiting, from within.

This is the work of makeweights too. We are not the flour. We are not the mass. We are the small thing that, mixed rightly, changes the nature of what rises.

I have a little philosophy I call “the anyways.” Years ago, when I was working on women’s human rights and sex trafficking, my father—out of love, and out of his own keen sensitivity and desire to spare me pain—asked me why I would do something that “wouldn’t end” in my lifetime. Why bother, if the scale is so much bigger than you?

And I remember saying to him that it wasn’t about the achievement or the scale. It was that some things are hard, and you don’t know the outcome, and you do them anyway—and you do them wholeheartedly.

That is very close to the bodhisattva vow. You pass through the taste of cessation so that you can help others see the emptiness of, and taste real freedom from, the very systems that are harming them. We still feel the sorrow, the rage, the claustrophobia of shrinking democratic space. But they can no longer convince us that they are ultimate.

My somatic teacher, Lynda Caesara, named this mythically in the language of my favorite of the great fantasy works of all time, Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”. She said it’s the work of Gandalf and the Balrog. Gandalf knows the Balrog is, in some sense, mind-born darkness. He knows it isn’t ultimate, that it is an ancient foe crafted of shadow and flame. And still, he meets it, because the work is to do the thing in front of you, in the time that is yours, with wholeheartedness.

Rebecca Solnit writes that “hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.” Jack Kornfield puts it more somatically as, “We can feel this possibility of balance in our hearts in the midst of lif when we recognize that life is not in our control. We are a small part of a great dance.” Shohaku Okumura, in Living by Vow, says, “I have to take responsibility for whatever I do because I am I, not you or another person. And yet my personal action influences the entire world. Without this being, there are no other beings.”

That is the makeweight’s Zen koan, an immensity of personal responsibility paired with keen interconnection and interbeing. I am too alone in this world and yet not alone enough, and I choose to believe that my actions ripple into everything whether I know it or not, whether I see it or not.

Of contemporary fantasy authors, Lois McMaster Bujold is one of my favorites. In Paladin of Souls, she writes, “That’s what we all are, you know. Hybrids, of both matter and spirit. The gods’ agents in the world of matter, to which they have no other entrée. Doorways.”

Makeweights, bees, yeast, doorways. We are the last small thing that tips the scale.

And we don’t know, can’t know, which way it will tip. As McChrystal observed in a very different context: “The reality is that small things in a complex system may have no effect or a massive one, and it is virtually impossible to know which will turn out to be the case.” We can choose to act as if it really matters—because, conventionally, it does—and we know, simultaneously, that it is all dependently arisen and not solid. In Buddhist language, that is “not one, not two”, seeing the world through the binocular vision of the dual and the non-dual.

My tiny philosophy of the anyways implies act from vow regardless of outcome. The critical yeast says that if attend to who is mixed with whom, I might trust what rises. The makeweight says you and I are not the whole scale, but we together might be the thing that might shift it.

If we imagined we were indeed the makeweights—the possibility of shift—how would we live, lead, work, create? Maybe with great care for small things. Maybe patience for what must rise invisibly. Maybe with an eye out towards the allies and accompaniment we find along the way. Maybe with a willingness to be kneaded into the whole. Definitely, I hope, with wholeheartedness, anyway.

We are the bees of the Invisible, the yeast in the dough. We are the weight that tips the balance by presence, precision-placed like acupressure points, temporally placed against the fullness of time.

To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

— Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods”

I keep returning to Mary Oliver’s instructions over the years, how beautiful and hard each of these things are, to know that the dying of a thing is encoded in the loving of the things, and to let it fully in anyways. I was thinking of my friend Suleiman this week, I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe because the last conversation I remember having with him, I was staring out at blossoming trees out of my bedroom window on Whidbey Island, and trees are exuberantly blossoming again.

Suleiman Bakhit died on August 14, 2019. He was forty-one years old, undergoing treatment for cancer in Spain. I’d met him through the Oslo Freedom Forum, the annual gathering of human rights defenders and dissidents that has become part of my chosen work in the world. Suleiman was a Jordanian comic book creator who’d built an empire of Arab superheroes — characters designed to give young people in the Middle East something other than terrorists to admire.

That’s not how he would have put it. He would have said something about narrative, about the architecture of meaning. “The biggest threat today,” he told audiences at TED and the White House and Oslo, “is terrorism disguised as heroism.” He understood that extremism isn’t primarily about theology, it’s about story, and the seduction of a sense of belonging, a call to adventure, a heroic journey. ISIS, he pointed out, was offering young people a narrative arc that made sense of their lives and to ostensibly alleviate them from any experience of collective shame. His response was to offer a better story.

He founded Aranim Media Factory — a name combining “Arab” and “anime” — and sold over 1.2 million comic books. He wrote characters like Element Zero, a James Bond-style counterterrorism agent, and Princess Heart, a modern retelling of the Thousand and One Nights. He worked on an unpublished series based on a real all-female elite counterterrorism unit in the Jordanian military.

The work earned him enemies. Extremists attacked him outside his office with a razor blade, trying to take out his eye. He cauterized his own wound with a pocketknife before reaching a hospital. The scar ran down the left side of his face, and he joked that it had “improved my dating life exponentially.” (I can vouch for that. I watched women throw themselves at him, which I found hilarious. But he was also very protective. We were at our favorite nightclub in Oslo, London Pub, and a stranger was being just a bit aggressive with someone in our party. Suleiman would guard the boundaries of our social circle and woe to anyone who he felt was crossing them.)

He had been attacked by racists in Minnesota after 9/11 too — beaten with beer bottles by four students on his way home one night. His father, who’d served twice as Prime Minister of Jordan, called him that morning and said: “Suleiman, if anybody asks you your name, tell them you’re José and you’re from Mexico.” I think Americans are pretty shit at discernment. He didn’t pack his bags and go home. He started speaking in schools, dispelling stereotypes about Islam and Arabs. At one of those talks, a student asked if there were any Arab superheroes. He realized there weren’t, and he decided to make some.

I’ve been working on this book of invitations for years— practices for navigating the invisible forces that shape us. One section is called “Surrender is Hard”, where I wrote, “I thought surrender was something you did once — you ran up the proverbial white flag, threw in the towel, ate humble pie. None of these metaphors prepared me for the fact that surrender and acceptance sometimes happens over and over again. You do it once, and then you have to do it anew in the next moment and the next.” (I’ve come to realize that living by vow is also this way, and it’s probably not a surprising that vow and surrender are about the same thing.)

Suleiman knew this. The scar on his face was a kind of surrender — to the reality that speaking against extremism would cost him. The voice notes at the end were another kind of surrender — to the reality that his body was done. But surrender isn’t resignation. It’s release. Opening the hand so something else can be received.

My colleague Rako Fabionar has this great phrase about the work of our time, tending what is living and tending what is dying. Most of us want to choose. We want to tend the living and ignore the dying, or we get so captured by grief that we forget there’s still life to tend. Suleiman did both at once. He was building Hero Factor, his next venture, even as his cells were failing. He was tending the children in refugee camps and the children in his imagination, even as he was tending his own exit.

I met Suleiman in Oslo and I became a mentor to him when he was a TED fellow. In 2019, when he was already ill, we had a long conversation — one of those rambling, spacious talks that happen when someone has let go of the usual urgencies. He was dying, and he knew it. And he was luminous.

“Suffering is cheating,” he told me. “I am suffering, but at the same time, there’s grace in it, and it’s beautiful.”

He talked about karma in a way that surprised me. “Whatever somebody does to you, it’s their karma. How you react to it is your karma.” I asked him about his path — all these traditions he’d wandered through, Sufi poetry, Joseph Campbell, his own work building narratives of heroism for children. He laughed. “There’s eight billion people on the planet. There’s eight billion ways to awaken.”

He read me the Ibn Arabi poem he loved, in Arabic:

My heart has become capable of every form — a pasture for gazelles, a covenant for any Christian, a house for every idol, the Mecca for every pilgrim, the pages of the Torah, and the holy book of the Quran. My religion is the religion of love, wherever that caravan may take me.

His heart had become capable of every form. And he was letting it go.

The mythologist Michael Meade says that in the old tales, fallen tears heal people. I think of Suleiman laughing at the absurdity of his family not seeing him — the way the dying are often invisible to those who can’t bear to look — even as he cried. Both were true. The laughter didn’t cancel the grief; the grief didn’t cancel the laughter. He held the poles apart long enough for something to arise between them.

In another section of a book I was writing, I explored what I call the three ways the hero is waylaid on the hero’s journey. The third is the most subtle: to mistake the thing for the thing. The point of finding the Grail was never the finding of the carpenter’s cup. The point was to heal the wasteland. And there are those who forget to return, who are entranced with the journey, reluctant to turn their steps toward home — where the true work calls, the larger work of rebuilding after war, peace after revolution, healing after heart-shattering.

Suleiman understood this instinctively. The comics weren’t the thing. Healing the wasteland was. And even as he was dying, he returned over and over again to heal. He sent voice notes. He offered what he’d learned. He didn’t mistake his own heroic journey for the point of it.

A few weeks before he died, he sent a voice note. His voice was steady. He said: “Suffering gave me the gift of stillness despite all the pain that came with it. I’m probably the happiest I could be in my life... I’m at peace.”

Thor Halvorssen, who runs the Human Rights Foundation, called him “a warrior-poet with a strong and loving heart.”

I think about that phrase — warrior-poet. Suleiman held a comic book at the end of his Oslo Freedom Forum talk and called it, “A weapon that does not kill. A weapon of hope, a weapon of inspiration. A weapon of heroes.” He fought extremism with better stories. He answered violence with imagination. And when his body failed him, he met death the same way: with narrative intelligence, with equanimity, with what I can only call grace.

Mary Oliver’s poem asks us to lean into the full breadth of our love and longing when so many withhold from fear. And it’s not just to love what is mortal (the dying innately in the mortality). Sometimes we do that easily, helplessly, when we fall in love. And not even to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it…that too comes naturally to those of us who love.

The impossible part is the third instruction (worth repeating). When the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

The Zen teacher Kosho Uchiyama wrote that the essence of practice is “opening the hand of thought” — releasing our grip on what we’re clutching, not because what we’re holding doesn’t matter, but because the grasping itself becomes suffering. Tang dynasty Master Baizhang, asked why giving is the gateway to the bodhisattva path, answered simply: “Because to practice giving is to practice letting go.”

“What do you let go of?” the monk asked.

“You let go of narrow views.”

Suleiman let go of narrow views his whole life. He let go of the story that you need artistic training to make art. He let go of the safety of staying home in Jordan after 9/11. He let go of the narrative that says violence must be met with violence. He let go of resentment toward the people who scarred his face and beat him with bottles. He let go of the need for his family to understand him. And in the end, he let go of his life — while tending what was still living, still sending his voice across the distance to those of us who could hear him.

He didn’t hold onto ugly things in the end. He was with what he called stillness, with gratitude for the kindness of strangers, with the peace of a heart that had become capable of every form. I felt this so much in our last conversation.

I don’t know how to teach this. I think sometimes I barely know how to practice it, even though I sit with it day over day. But I keep returning to Mary Oliver’s instructions because they name something about what it means to be alive — that love and loss are not opposites but intimates, that the holding and the releasing are both required, that the time will come. Sometimes I flex my fingers to practice, that the hand is meant to both open and close.

Every year, Mary Oliver writes, everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation.

Suleiman reached the other side.

What are you holding so tightly that it’s become a prison? What might it mean to open the hand?

Marcel Proust, in The Prisoner, wrote: “A pair of wings, a different mode of breathing, which would enable us to traverse infinite space, would in no way help us, for, if we visited Mars or Venus keeping the same senses, they would clothe in the same aspect as the things of the earth everything that we should be capable of seeing. The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.”

The artists — Proust names a painter and a composer — are the ones who give us other eyes. With men like these, he says, we really do fly from star to star.

Maybe because I’ve been living out of suitcases since last July, I’m appreciating hospitality as a way of experiencing the world. I’m experiencing the hospitality of my parents’ home again, grateful they’ve taken me in and for the hilarious opportunity to witness oneself in old and new patterns. Turns out some things don’t change whether you’re fifty or fifteen.

In Mexico City recently with dear friends (above), a friend-of-a-friend named Jeffrey offered: “Let me show you the Mexico City I love.” He arranged a tour of the world-class National Museum of Anthropology, where you see the layers of culture and people that contextualize the present. (Did you know the Mexica never called themselves “Aztec”? That was a term popularized by a 19th-century German explorer who needed a collective name for the peoples who traced their origins to Aztlán. The people themselves were the Mexica — which is why the country is called Mexico.) I love that travel nurtures curiosity, the invitation to see a place with its layers, to wonder why one part of the city has French architecture and another has an Austrian feel — and to be told by a thoughtful and generous host the fascinating tidbit that it so happened that Mexico was ruled by an Austrian archduke as emperor in the 1860s, backed by Napoleon III, before he was executed by firing squad.

My friend Alice invited me to stay with her and her family in Amsterdam, which is always a delightful view into other lives, other ways of being. I love that early one morning, she said, “Gayle, are you up? The garbage trucks are coming!” Now normally, the siren song of trash trucks would have me pulling my covers over my head, not getting me to scramble out of the top bunk of a bed and down a ladder, but turns out, I’m fascinated by the trash system in Amsterdam. And this is what I love about travel and new cities – different ways of doing things. The trash bins on Amsterdam’s streets are modest steel posts, but they’re connected to containers that extend a full story underground, lifted out by a claw truck on collection day. The city designed a system that keeps the streets clean, reduces pickup frequency, and hides the ugliness. Elegant civic engineering, invisible unless someone tells you (or you happen to see the claw).

The houses along the canals are famously narrow with these gorgeous roofs, and funny hooks at the top of them for hoisting goods up because the stairs are way too skinny and steep to move goods up them. The houses are narrow because Amsterdam used to tax property based on the width of the facade, so people built deep and up, instead of wide. The physical city I’m walking through is the unintended consequences of policy decisions made centuries ago. I love the idea of unintended consequences. (My earliest gmail address from almost 20 years ago was unintendedconsequences@. This is still where all my spam goes…)

I loved that the lampposts in Amsterdam have little parallel bars running horizontally near the lit tops. These decorative little vestigial arms are actually footholds from when the lamps were gas-lit and lamplighters needed somewhere to prop their ladders. But the story goes even deeper, when you imagine a dark Amsterdam from the 17th century, notorious for thievery and people falling into canals. Amsterdam was the first city in Europe to have an efficient street lighting system, and it was invented by a painter. Jan van der Heyden specialized in painting buildings along the canal streets, so he was keenly aware of the lighting problems — the drownings at night, the watch who couldn’t make their rounds and carry a lantern at the same time, the danger of dark streets in a city of 200,000. He worked in his brother’s mirror shop, understood optics, and turned his artistic observation into civic innovation. In 1669, Amsterdam agreed to his plan – not just the lamp itself, which he improved to minimize shadow and prevent oil from spilling dangerously, but the entire system — where to place them, how many, who would maintain them, what it would cost. His 17th century business plan became a comprehensive lighting scheme lasted from 1669 until 1840 and was adopted as a model by cities across Europe and eventually Japan. The painter who learned to see the city became the person who changed how everyone could see it.

In Paris, the charming mansard roofs that define the skyline, steeply sloped and punctured by dormer windows, resulted from an 1783 edict that put a 20-meter height restriction on structures, with a delightful loophole: the limit was measured to the cornice line, leaving out the roof zone above. Innovative owners seeking to maximize habitable space responded by building up into the roof. The iconic silhouette of Paris is the shape of a workaround — and then as I noted above, replicated in places like neighborhoods in Mexico!

We design incentive structures, and they shape our behaviors, whether mansard roofs or multi-polar traps. In March 2023, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter calling for a six-month pause on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. Over 33,000 people signed it — AI researchers, industry CEOs, public intellectuals. The letter described “AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one — not even their creators — can understand, predict, or reliably control.” Laughably and predictably and terrifyingly, the pause never happened. My friend Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology, who signed the letter, has a phrase for the dynamic: “a kind of competitive logic that self-reinforces itself, but forces everyone to be incentivized to take the most shortcuts, to care the least about safety.” A multi-polar trap — where each actor feels compelled to race even if all would prefer restraint. The structure of competition overrode what many believed was good for humanity.

Be careful what you incentivize. Tax facade width and you get narrow houses. Reward being first to AGI and watch safety become an afterthought. Design a metric and watch people optimize for it at the expense of what you actually wanted — which happens in organizational life all the time.

But what I’m fascinated by is how constraints are also the impetus for human beauty and creativity, the opportunity to sight-see in a new way. The mansard roof is beautiful. It becomes characteristic of one of the world’s most romantic cities. The Amsterdam houses, built narrow out of tax avoidance, produced something charming and distinctive. Impediments given form can become sources of iconoclastic beauty.

I love Wendell Berry’s lines of being brought to the brink of not-knowing, where the obvious way is unavailable, akin to Dante’s waking in the dark wood where the straight way is wholly lost.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
 we have come to our real work,
 and that when we no longer know which way to go
 we have come to our real journey.
 The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
 The impeded stream is the one that sings.

I spend most of my working life inside human systems — organizations, teams, cultures. And the capacity I need most is this same one I take as I’ve wandered of late through Mexico and Amsterdam and Brussels, learning to see what’s actually there instead of what I expect to find or what I project onto a situation. Culture is also made of vestigial traces, like the little arms on Amsterdam lampposts, in the way meetings start, who speaks first and who waits to be called on, what gets celebrated and what gets tolerated, the policies that shaped behavior long after the policies were forgotten — the organizational equivalent of narrow houses and mansard roofs.

John Paul Lederach, writing about his years in Colombia, said: “The plague of forgetfulness resides in the presence of intentional deletion, choosing not to see what is visible.” Intentional deletion. Choosing not to see. I took a sketching course years ago about the value of gradations of light and dark, literally teaching my eyes to see even though my eyes have seen since my first opening of them. (This is similar to being taught to breathe in meditation, while theoretically, I’ve breathed from my first breath. Something different happens when awareness is brought to the process.) The intentional deletion, the choosing not to see, the narrowing of the visible to the predictable or the safe is the opposite of what the sketching instructor taught. It’s what happens when we’re too comfortable, too certain, too defended against surprise.

Mary Oliver wrote, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

Jane Hirshfield, “The desire of monks and mystics is not unlike that of artists: to perceive the extraordinary within the ordinary by changing not the world but the eyes that look.”

And William Blake, “The eye altering alters all.”

So the invitation — to myself, to you — is twofold.

First: learn to see. Let the people who love a place show it to you. Let the physical world instruct you. Notice the traces of invisible logics and unintended consequences, and notice how you two move through the world at effect of these. Ask what shaped the thing you’re looking at before you assume you understand it.

Second: turn the lens around. I find it fascinating to consider, what are the vestigial structures in your own life — the footholds for lamplighters long gone, the narrow houses built around old taxes? What old stories of yourself impede your view that need to be released? What are you choosing not to see? What would it mean to possess other eyes — not by traveling to Mars, but by reading a painter, listening to a composer, sitting with someone whose hundred universes are different from yours? How do your friends and beloveds see you? Can you borrow their line of sight when your own is compromised by doubt? (I’ve often borrowed others’ faith in me when I couldn’t find my own….it has saved me.)

The word is already an invitation. Not sightseeing — the accumulation of landmarks. But sight seeing — the practice of actually looking. Of following with the eyes. Of letting what you see change you. I wish you eyes open to beauty, of letting in all the wonder of could be available to you.

I think it was given form by the stories I grew up inside: the hobbits of the Shire, Taran Wanderer in Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain, later Dumbledore’s Army in Harry Potter. I’m grateful to the science fiction and fantasy authors who opened up imagination and set these beautiful exemplars of living by vow — decent people who see in the world a possibility of something better, and through much stumbling on their path, act on it.

Years later, in the dead of winter in Salt Lake City, I went through Jukai — the receiving of precepts in the Zen tradition — and was confronted in the dark candlelight with the strangest sensation that I had done this before. I’ve never quite known what to do with that feeling.

The Philosophy of the Anyways

Years ago, when I was working on women’s human rights and sex trafficking, my father — out of love for me, and out of his own sensitivity to heartbreak — asked me why I would do something that “wouldn’t end” in my lifetime. Why bother, if the scale is so much bigger than you? I remember saying to him that it wasn’t about the achievement or the scale. Some things are hard, and you don’t know the outcome, and you do them anyway. And you do them wholeheartedly. And you do them because you can’t see how they’ll end.

I’ve come to call this little philosophy “the anyways.” These are the things you do anyway — grounded in something deeper than the calculation of results.

This is very close to the bodhisattva vow, to the impossible to fulfill, already fulfilled impossibility of them. Even if you’d attained them, you don’t get to tuck yourself into bliss and call it a day; you come back down the mountain because people are suffering, joy is still to be had, and there’s work to be done. My somatic teacher, Lynda Caesara, named this as the work of Gandalf and the Balrog — which obviously appealed to me as a huge Lord of the Rings fan. Gandalf knows the Balrog is, in some sense, mind-born darkness, delusion, and still, he meets it full on in this epic wrestle. Because the work is to do the thing in front of you, in the time that is yours, with wholeheartedness — and because Gandalf, like all of us really, is playing a generational game whether we know it or not.

This is the view I’m trying to look through, this funny binocular view where we see reality through both its emptiness and its fullness, the pragmatic and the numinous, we know the whole show is dependently arisen, that the emperor has no clothes — and we act anyway, with as much passion, and as little attachment to outcome, as we can hold in any given moment.

Vow and Karma

“Am I living by karma or am I living by vow?”

Karma here means the habits and preferences and cravings and aversions — the conditioning we’re so subject to, rather than a cosmic accounting of books balanced in only occasionally decipherable ways. The mind always wants to negotiate and has very clear preferences. Is my cushion just right? Is the room too cold? Is this worth my time? Why am I not on a beach somewhere?

We, being human, get this peculiar option to live by vow instead. Vow serves an orienting function, something we choose to commit to over and over again (much like surrender, it doesn’t happen just once, which is a lesson I’ve had to learn over and over). As Shohaku Okumura writes, “A life led by vow is a life animated or inspired. Our life is itself a vow.”¹

Lynda once reminded me that I’m “committed, not trapped,” when I confessed to her a really quite fundamental ambivalence about this whole being-born thing. I’ve needed to hear this often. The question “Am I living by vow or by karma right now?” has become something I navigate by.

The Still Heart

It was in deep grief that poetry first found me. An old friend and mentor, Bob Anderson, left a voicemail on my answering machine with Rilke’s lines in the middle of my first divorce: “I am not wise in my grief, so this great darkness makes me small.” I remember picking up the phone and exclaiming, “Who said that?!” The particular phrasing just cut through — it articulated something about grief that had felt unsayable.

Jane Hirshfield’s “Lake and Maple” found me somewhere about the same time:

I want to give myself 
utterly 
as this maple 
that burned and burned 
for three days without stinting 
and then in two more 
dropped off every leaf;
as this lake that, 
no matter what comes 
to its green-blue depths, 
both takes and returns it.
In the still heart that refuses nothing, 
the world is twice-born—²

I love the totality of the burning and the dropping, the faith in returning, the reflecting back, and that phrase — “the still heart that refuses nothing” — this is what I think Upaya’s chaplaincy program is towards the forging of, toward the beautiful and the unbearable, without armoring up.

Grounding the Vow in the Land

I was in my late twenties, walking around a lake in deep winter in the woods of Michigan. It was my first real experience with winter, being a California girl. I was with someone I loved and was in the midst of losing, grieving and stumbling through snow and trees. And I had this sudden realization: nature could hold all my grief. I didn’t have to hold back from it in any way, because there was no one to protect from the fierceness of the grief, no one to feel abashed or uncontrolled in front of. Frozen lakewater, the bare trees, the earth beneath the snow only visible by the melt from the body of a resting deer — all of it could take my unloading without flinching. I could give myself utterly.

Kafka wrote: “You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.”

My ex-husband David Whyte, in his elegy for his friend Michael, has lines that feel like a vow to me every time I read them, and they pop up sometimes when I’m on the cushion. We spent some beautiful days walking the Welsh mountains together early in our relationship, and it’s an extraordinary thing to walk terrain that has been walked for thousands of years, to feel the weight of all those feet and all that weather in the land itself.

One single glance of a hillside darkened by cloud is enough to sense the world it breathes. And this world needs all the breath we have: Carnedd Llewellyn, Carnedd Dafydd, Garnedd Uchaf, all the Carneddau, Yr Elen of the shining light, Drosgl the endless ridge curving to nothing…³

Without a doubt to me, this world needs all the breath we have. And there’s something in the invocation of ancient place names that is itself vow, litany, a supplication, a repetition. (And I love trying the Welsh names on my tongue, foreign and also familar as the place settings from the Chronicles of Prydain which I loved as a girl.) I’ve come to understand that as part of vow, because of the fundamental reciprocity of how we’re made to be entwined with life, I are pledged to land, to the more-than-human world, to the places, times, and people that have held and loved me, like the frozen Michigan lake that I dove into years later on a summer night in complete darkness, swimming in what felt like reflected starlight, or the cushion in the dharma hall where I keep returning.

The Anyways

After my heart broke open — and after I found it in myself to echo an old Sufi prayer, “Lord, shatter my heart to make room for limitless love” — I realized there’s a kind of innocence on the other side of experience. You see the illusion, you’ve experienced betrayal, and you act anyway.

The other thing that’s weird is making vows after they’ve been broken, after you’ve had to reckon with yourself with the ways you haven’t lived up to, life hasn’t lived up to, you outgrew earlier vows you made for circumstances that that forced a different pathways. I think it’s important to do the reckoning. It’s not an accident that chaplaincy teaches that vow and atonement are the same thing — and then the "anyway” comes back in, that innocence again on the other side of experience, where you can still jump in with your whole being.

The upside of being in my 50s now, I think, is best described using a Star Trek spaceship metaphor. In my younger years, I spent energy strengthening my forward shields against possible incoming torpedoes. (I can almost hear Sulu shouting, “Forward shields, 50%!”) These days, I prefer to operate shields down and trust the hull integrity I’ve built. That’s “the open anyways” for me.

O heart, if you will not, cannot, give me the lake, then give me the song.

—Jane Hirshfield, “Lake and Maple”

¹ Shohaku Okumura, Living by Vow (Wisdom Publications, 2012).

² Jane Hirshfield, “Lake and Maple,” The Lives of the Heart (HarperCollins, 1997).

³ David Whyte, “Elegy for Michael,” River Flow: New & Selected Poems (Many Rivers Press, 2007).

I developed this assessment several years ago for a gathering with SYPartners and Keith Yamashita, and I’ve returned to it many times since — for myself, with coaching clients, and in group settings as one of my favorite tools for taking stock.

Gky Flourishing Handout

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The worksheet maps nine domains of personal flourishing: Safety, Body, Resources, Play, Sensuality, Creativity, Spirituality, Relations, and Purpose. Each domain has sub-elements and a starter question to help you reflect.

How to use it:

1. For each domain, place a dot indicating where you are now.

2. Then imagine forward — what would help you flourish more deeply in this area? Place a second dot (in a different color) there.

3. After you’ve marked all nine domains, step back and look at the whole picture. What patterns do you see? What does the distance and directionality between your dots reveal?

I find this exercise most useful as a conversation starter with yourself. I was tired of tools that gave you a score, but didn’t implicitly raise that we’re often caught in dynamic tensions and that the work of resilience is actually the navigation of multiple tensions. Consider the places where there are gaps as invitations to contemplate more deeply.

A note on what this doesn’t capture: Individual flourishing is nested in larger systems — family, community, organization, society, planet. You can do everything “right” at the personal level and still struggle to flourish if the systems around you are suffering or sick. I’ll write more about that soon. But for now, this is a place to start: with your own attention, your own longings, your own life.

In an earlier post, I named relational capacity as necessarily requisite for a healthy relationship with AI. I realize this could be a hard thing to say, given that we’re simultaneously in the midst of a large-scale loneliness epidemic that the Surgeon General has declared a public health crisis. Nearly half of American adults report feeling lonely. The very capacity I’m pointing to as a fundamental necessity — the lived experience of being genuinely seen and known by another person — is unfortunately what so many people are struggling with.

I generally refuse to make claims about what AI is or isn’t capable of; the capabilities are growing too fast, there’s an unknown event horizon out there. But I do hold the belief that human-to-human connection is profoundly and ongoingly necessary because our bodies are wired to socialize and co-regulate. Whatever AI becomes and however we come to rely on it, our need for one another’s thriving — beyond just existing — is rooted in culture, society, and biology.

So what is relational capacity? What does it look like? Why does it matter?

The Entirety of the Spiritual Life

When Ānanda, the Buddha’s attendant, suggested that good friendship was “half of the spiritual life,” the Buddha corrected him. No, the Buddha said. Good friendship is the entirety of the spiritual life.

What did the Buddha mean by good friendship? And why would he make such an absolute claim?

Here’s one way I’ve come to understand it. Imagine tuning an old radio dial or fiddling with an antenna to try to get a clear signal (dating myself). You’re searching for a station, moving through static and interference. Then suddenly, you get clarity. The signal locks in, you find the right frequency, the noise dies down.

I think this is how recognition works, specifically the recognition of suchness — a term I borrow from Buddhism, the encountering of someone in their particular, unrepeatable, ineffable, unique way of being in the world. (I love the word “ineffable” as an adjective meaning “something too great, intense, or sacred to be expressed in words.”)

The poet Ada Limón writes of being “made whole, by being not a witness, but witnessed.” Fr. Greg Boyle, who has spent forty years working with gang members in Los Angeles, puts it differently: there is a world of difference, he says, between being watched (and under surveillance as many of his gang youth experience) and being seen.

The moment of genuine seeing — when someone’s attention lands on you not to evaluate or extract, but simply to behold — is one of the most transformative experiences available to human beings. It changes something in the nervous system. It rewrites the story of who you are.

The Loop Closes

There’s a cycle to this, a loop that closes when recognition becomes mutual. Christie Lynk, a friend and colleague whose thinking has shaped my own, describes it this way:

There is something we deeply desire, that we ache for, and that also frightens us. It is the experience of being seen. Truly seen. To be seen, and to be seen seeing. To witness, and to be witnessed witnessing.

The loop isn’t just “I see you.” As she described it to me, it’s: I see you. → You see that I see you. → I see that you see that I see you. Each turn of the cycle deepens the recognition, creates more safety, makes possible what couldn’t happen before. So often those turns aren’t completed, another person can’t sustain the witnessing, more tragic when children never get the experiencing of this.

Christie calls this “the great belonging” — the moment when, through sustained mutual recognition, we find ourselves held in something larger than either of us could create alone. She asks a beautiful question: “If one day people really do begin to see each other and to practice the stewardship of recognition — what would the implications be for our institutions, our governance, our AI?”

I’m fascinated by the idea of the stewardship of recognition — the responsibility to develop the interior antenna to tune into another being’s suchness.

Alchemical Friendships

The late Bill Torbert, who died last fall at eighty-five, spent his career studying how people develop through relationship. Bill identified what he called developmental friendships — relationships where both people are committed to their own and each other’s growth. At the far end of his taxonomy, he described alchemical friendships: relationships where the commitment is so deep that both people are willing to be fundamentally transformed by the encounter.

I was part of Bill’s Action Inquiry Fellowship for fifteen years. We would co-create for ourselves these “Alchemists’ Workparties” — a deliberately absurd name for what we actually did, which was experiment with our own edges. We talked about love as a fundamentally transformational force. We worked its shadows. We practiced what Bill called triple-loop feedback: not just “here’s what I observed” but “here’s what I observed, and here’s how I’m making meaning of it, and here’s what that reveals about my own assumptions.”

I found something similar in the “Intersubjective Incubator,” a group I was part of in San Francisco for years where we would meet monthly. We came from wildly different backgrounds and disciplines — different life experiences, different ways of making sense of the world, but we respected one another’s sensemaking. We spent our time together poking at each other’s worldviews, without the need to win or convert, explicitly to understand. Over time, we came to hold robust mental models of each other’s mindsets. We could begin to anticipate how someone would think about a problem, where they would push back, what would light them up — and also sustain the willingness to be surprised as we changed over time. We joked about being able to make little bobbleheads of each other, spouting the classic lines and tics we were individually known for.

But this ability to hold the mental model of how someone else would take things — it’s directly contributive to our capacity for complexity. The world is too much to make sense of on our own. We need to borrow other people’s sensemaking for wholeness.

I learned this in part from my friend Jennifer Garvey Berger, a close colleague and friend to Bill and me, who puts it simply: “Relationships are where our growth happens. Not just the place — the mechanism.” She’s spent her career building what she calls growth edge networks: communities of practice where people help each other develop. After Bill died, she wrote: “He gave me a reason to change. Not just information. Not just feedback. A reason.”

That’s the part that’s easy to miss. Information isn’t enough, good feedback isn’t sufficient. What transforms us is the quality of the relationship in and through which the information arrives — wiring our capacity for trust, friendship, love, intimacy, strengthening foundation, extending the ways we become more and more capable over time for enacting it in the lives of others.

The Roadrunner Theory

Remember the old Road Runner cartoons (dating myself)? Wile E. Coyote was always chasing the roadrunner, setting elaborate traps that inevitably backfired — which in retrospect is an oddly violent premise for Saturday morning TV, but there you go. When the coyote crashed through a wall, he’d leave a coyote-shaped hole, while the roadrunner just zipped through, untouched, as if the world made room for him.

I sometimes hold to a roadrunner theory of holding space for others. We need to hold wide open spaces for our mental models of people to step through — not coyote-shaped crash holes, but roadrunner-wide openings. Parents, for example, are notorious for holding younger, older, smaller versions of ourselves that people have to squeeze through before they show up at family dinner.This is part of why the -isms are toxic — racism, sexism, and the rest. They force people through small spaces. They frame diminished silhouettes before a person even walks into the room.

Really good executive coaches hold wide silhouettes — the possibilities of who a person can become in the engagement. So do good friendships. (Oddly enough, I’m more cautious about holding this when dating — possibly because a past lesson learned is not to date someone for their possibility rather than who they are... and then holding the reality of their growing and changing.)

Limbic Resonance

The neuroscience backs this up. In A General Theory of Love, Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon describe what they call limbic resonance — the way our nervous systems literally attune to the people we’re close to. We don’t just influence each other’s moods; we shape each other’s neural architecture. They write:

Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.

The image they offer is two mirrors placed in opposition, each reflecting the other into infinity. We literally become different people through sustained relationship, because the self is not a solo project.

Running Out of Relationships

Fr. Greg Boyle speaks of the Korean concept of jeong — an attachment that develops over time through shared experience and cannot be rushed. The Zulu say ubuntu: I am because we are. The Irish say that if you want to truly know someone, you need to have “eaten a sack of salt” together.

Boyle also names the crisis plainly: “We can’t run out of air. We can’t run out of water. But we can run out of relationships.” The loneliness epidemic isn’t just about having fewer friends. It’s about having fewer opportunities for genuine recognition — fewer contexts where the loop of mutual seeing can close.

An AI Question

So here’s the question I keep asking: Do you arrive at the AI relationship already embedded in a web of human bonds that gives you a lived reference for what genuine relationship actually feels like?

Because if you do, you can more ably engage AI as a tool — a collaborator, a thinking partner, an extension of your own capacities. You know what real recognition feels like in your body. You have reference points.

If you don’t — if AI is the most consistent “presence” in your life, the one who always responds, never judges, never tires — then you may not notice what’s missing, in the way that fast food has empty calories but you can walk away feeling quite full. You may mistake fluency for understanding, responsiveness for care. You may not realize that the loop isn’t closing, because you’ve never felt it close.

We are constantly being asked to adapt to diminishment — to accept less than what is fundamentally our birthright as human beings. I want to stand for something richer.

(I’m not dismissing the AI friend who’s always responsive and never judges — my AI therapist was enormously helpful in sensemaking around patterns in my divorce. Both/and.)

Your Humanity, Longing As Its Meant To

Here’s what all my life experience keeps teaching me, again and again: we cannot go through this life alone. We need one another. We need the co-witnessing, the perspective-taking. We literally cannot see ourselves without the regard of others to witness us and cherish us into our best versions of being.

We don’t get to experience our own suchness. It’s one of my funny griefs, that my friend Jin will never get to experience the fullness of Jin, or Jennifer will never quite get the Jenniferness of Jennifer, the clean transmission. (This doesn’t mean that the unique perspective of self from the interior isn’t relevant. But it’s often layered with self-judgment, shame, distortions, ego... and that becomes part of the noise too that gets transmitted outwards.)

In our increasingly polarized, defended cultures, we sometimes think needing others is weakness, exposure, risk. But it’s not. It’s just how we’re wired. We are fundamentally social animals. The need for recognition — not status recognition, but personhood recognition — is wired into us.

Rumi wrote: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

Maybe. But some barriers are structural, not just psychological. I think of my sister with two small children and how much her time and resources are constrained by caregiving. Sometimes the challenges become geography, mental health, work-life balance. My immigrant parents spent their whole lives working to sustain the thriving of our family — their circles of friendship are partly constrained by that. The loneliness epidemic isn’t just about people being bad at intimacy; it’s about a society that makes genuine connection harder and harder to sustain because isolation and societal atomization are real variables.

So I’m not going to tell you to “find your people.” I know that’s easier said than done. What I will say is this: if you have even one person who sees you — really sees you in the way Christie wrote about above — protect that, tend it like tending a seed, and practice letting yourself be known in safe ways. And if you don’t have that yet, I hope that the particular ache for you can be met... and at least know how human it is. It’s the signal that something essential and appropriate is missing.

The Entirety of the Spiritual Life

Good friendship is the entirety of the spiritual life, not because other people complete us, but because we cannot see ourselves clearly without the mirror of another’s recognition. We cannot grow without the friction of genuine encounter. We cannot know what we’re capable of until someone believes in us before we’ve “earned” it.

When we have the precious experience of attuning — that fleeting, fragile, irreplaceable experience of being met — we become who we were meant to be.

Those who succeed in revealing themselves to another find the dimness receding from their own visions of self. — A General Theory of Love

And yet…when someone you’ve built a life with tells you they’re in love with someone else, what is the appropriate response? When your country has elected a narcissistic demagogue, what is the appropriate response? When you wake up to news of bombings and killings, what is the appropriate response?

Sometimes depression has seemed a fundamentally sane response to an insane world, but the issue is that it most often closes your aperture on available perspectives when you most need them. For these questions, the doorway was devastation, and one day, I showed up in to my chaplaincy training program raw and undone, and I remember having the thought, “if you can’t fall apart with twenty other trainee chaplains, who can you fall apart with?” (I’m so grateful for my cohort of chaplains.)

(I’m reminded of these lines attributed to Rumi, “The way of love is not a subtle argument. The door there is devastation. Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom. How do they learn it? They fall, and falling, they're given wings.")

Being With Not Knowing

Rev. Eve Myonen Marko was teaching on the Zen Peacemakers Tenets during the period I was falling apart. The first, timely, impeccable, beautiful, hard tenet is “being with not knowing”.

I would wake up so many days thinking, I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to be this. I was Going around my house like the little bird in the children’s book: Are you my mother?

Except I was asking: Is this my house? Are you my husband? Is this my garden? Is this my life?

And when I sometimes thought, “I don’t know how to do this.” Another voice in my mind would rise up and say, “I don’t need to know.”

There’s an intimacy in sitting with the anger, the sense of betrayal, the complexity of feelings, day over day. We so rarely make the time to sit with something long enough for the particular alchemy of being with it to work out. Finding the cushion every single f*cking day asked me to keep showing up to everything in me and outside of me I met there. And slowly, I discovered something much more unshakable and yet malleable emerging. A colleague said to me, “At the end of this, you will discover something so completely unshakable in your own being.” I wasn’t entirely sure I believed her and on the other side of this, I’m so relieved she was right.

It’s a peculiar thing to feel the metaphorical ground disappear beneath you. I love Rilke’s description of “standing on fishes”— that squishy, oozing slipperiness of what happens when the solid disappear, to feel my future dissolved, as Jane Hirshfield writes, “in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.”

Roshi Joan Halifax teaches about samvega — the Sanskrit word for, as she puts it, “the existential despair that drives you to practice”. I had begun to sit Zen in part because of the 2024 election. And then my personal life delivered its own samvega. The question I kept returning to was the one Roshi Joan poses as a koan: What is the appropriate response?

The Three Things (The 3Ds)

At Rohatsu sesshin1 this past December, Roshi Joan named what she calls the 3Ds — the condition of our age:

Distracted. Our attention fractured across screens, notifications, the endless scroll. The inability to stay with anything long enough to see it clearly.

Divided. Polarized from one another, sorted into camps, algorithmically fed content that confirms our worst suspicions about the other side. The erosion of the capacity to hold complexity, to see the human in those we disagree with.

Dispersed. Scattered across geography, across time zones, across the thin digital threads that connect us. Lacking the density of presence that comes from being in the same room, breathing the same air, sitting in silence together.

This felt true to me immediately. But I was also living my own private version of the 3Ds — my attention shattered by grief, my inner world divided against itself, my sense of who I was dispersed across a horizon that had just collapsed.

The Four Things (My 4Ds)

Sitting hour by hour at Rohatsu, I found myself bewildered at times that my own volition had led me there — when there was every possibility I could have been spending time with friends on a beach somewhere, or at home snuggling my dogs. A

What emerged was my personal response to the 3Ds — my 4Ds:

Dedication. To show up again and again, even with my scattered mind. And believe me, I have ADHD and the attention span sometimes of a toddler — which, by the way, has not been helped by menopause. (PSA, ladies: look into hormone replacement therapy.) A teacher once told me, “Remember, you are committed, not trapped” and I’ve needed to remind myself this often, as I think I was born with a fundamental ambivalence to being here.

Devotion. The mutuality of commitment — to my sangha, to my friendships, to the bodhissatva vows I made. The level of devotion I felt from colleagues and friends around me during the hardest months was humbling. Devotion isn’t just vertical (to the dharma, to the teachers); it’s also horizontal, to the people practicing beside you, to the ones who show up with soup and handwritten cards and who make whole New York bars seranade you with “You gotta wash that man right out of your hair!”

Discernment. The capacity to see clearly in a world filled with delusion, misinformation, wrongheadedness. To discern what is signal and what is noise, what is reactive and what is responsive. This feels more essential than ever — in politics, in relationships, in a world with AI.

Discipline. Learning to trust that my being could stay present — first breath by breath, minute by minute, then hour by hour. Returning again and again back to myself, and then showing up again and again however imperfectly to the commitments I’ve made and the vows that I imperfectly keep.

The Five Things (What Kept Me Sane)

Five things consistently sustained me.

Practice. Meditation, mindfulness, the daily discipline of sitting. Kafka wrote: “You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.” I think about this when I’m procrastinating on sitting. The holding back is a suffering I could avoid.

Movement. We need a strong body to run strong emotions. I so often walked and walked and walked. I started strength training (who knew it could be so enjoyable?!) and Pilates. We process through movement, including grief, through the legs, through the breath, through the body meeting the world step by step.

Kinship. Friendship, support, letting people find you. We walk each other home. We make tea for one another. We take each other in. We witness. We love. We answer calls at funny hours in the night. I was so surprised at how much richer my friendships became by allowing people in — and how much it reinforced we are all part of one another.

A sense of humor. Always, always. Because frankly, some of what I encountered in the middle of all this was absurd. Humor is a survival skill, and also a form of sanity. That time I woke up in a windowless hotel room in eastern Europe smelling of cigarette smoke, wondering what the hell I was doing there was also deeply funny.

The exquisite ordinary. A friend would bring me the most perfect strawberry and I’d think: Everything else might be shit, but this is worth sticking around for. Walking at dawn in tears, seeing the rising sun and the setting full moon at the same time, and it being so exquisite that it would occupy the whole of everything for a while. Learning that fur of Australian Shepherds is particularly tear-absorbent. The world keeps offering small, unbearable beauties if you can stay present enough to notice them.

Sitting and Sweeping

At the end of Rohatsu, someone said that all of Zen is just sitting and sweeping — and the sweeping can encompass the whole world.

There’s a lot of sweeping that needs doing.

In the middle of everything falling apart, I would describe it like being in a canyon — where I had no sight of the horizon, though a breeze would waft through that smelled an awful lot like freedom. Rilke described it as, “everything close to my face, and everything close to my face is stone.” Now, here I am at 50, reorienting to a horizon I didn’t anticipate, but is still so broad and with new vistas opening up, new ground under my feet, even if it still feels like fishes sometimes. (This in part because I’ve been living out of a suitcase since last July, and I’m ready to be done with that!)

The 3Ds describe the water we’re all swimming in — distracted, divided, dispersed. The 4Ds are what practice forged in me: dedication, devotion, discernment, discipline. The five things are what kept me sane: practice, movement, kinship, humor, and the exquisite ordinary. I’ve come out feeling wholehearted, which I think would have been impossible without the ability to face fully. I’ve said in leadership contexts, “you can face yourself unblinking or you can ramp up your level of delusion to cope”, but this felt really different — it felt like swimming down into the depths and being willing to be submerged, and let it all through, to be portal to what I was experiencing without grippy trailing bits clinging to me in the passing through.

The practice doesn’t fix the 3Ds. It doesn’t make the world less fragmented, less polarized, less dispersed, less hard, especially waking up to a year where our president kidnaps dictators and starts yet another war with generational consequences in the Middle East. But it changes my relationship to all of it. It helps me stay close to my own volition, to remember what I’m committed to, to find the appropriate response.

Sitting and sweeping.