|
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
-Albert Camus
Dear Amy,
As many of you on the East Coast know, this winter weather has been frigid. The cold arrived in December and has lingered through February when we got hit again with more snow and cold temperatures. After the big snowstorm in January, the ice coated the driveways and sidewalks for weeks. The sky seemed perpetually gray. And in the midst of it all, I found myself “wintering” hard, pulling inward, staying home, and, other than the daily dog walks, choosing solitude over the effort it took to bundle up and go out into the world. This natural tendency to hibernate felt restorative and necessary. But as we begin to emerge from the darkest days, I know that it’s time to move out of isolation and reconnect with the world and each other. |
|
|
“Interacting with other people that is the single most important thing you can do for wellness, longevity, and happiness. And all the rest of this stuff is secondary.”
-Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel
|
|
| What I’m Listening To: The Case for Connection
I was recently listening to Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel discussing his book Eat Your Ice Cream and reflecting on what contributes to longevity and a life well-lived. I’ll admit I spent much of this winter focused on strength training and consuming protein just to feel heartier and to keep moving. But Emanuel argues that relationships matter more to longevity than any of that. They give us resilience, purpose, and a sense of belonging that sustains us through difficulty. In addition to simply having people in our lives, it is the quality and depth of those connections that matters. The research shows that meaningful relationships help us to live longer and better. The data is striking: people with few close relationships have a 22-33% higher risk of early death than those with strong social connections. About 20% of the population now have zero to one close friends. We know that relationships require tending. They require nurturing and showing up. They require the very thing that felt so hard this winter: reaching out, gathering, connecting.
Around the same time, I listened to a conversation between Ezra Klein and Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. Parker argues that we’ve forgotten how to gather with intention. We wait for the perfect occasion, the perfect venue, and the perfect guest list. We treat gathering as performance rather than connection. And in all that “waiting”, we miss the opportunity to actually be with each other.
What resonated most for me was Parker’s insistence that we don’t need to wait for perfect. We don’t need the beautifully set table or the carefully curated playlist or the weekend when everyone’s schedule aligns. We need to start now, where we are. Not wait until we perfect that recipe or clean up all the dog hair.
She also reminds us of the importance of being of service to others. She spoke beautifully of a gathering in which friends showed up at a new mother’s home armed with cleaning supplies and then spent the afternoon laughing and connecting while they scrubbed and tidied. This intentional outing wasn’t just a necessary service to a friend with little time on her hands. It was connection in its truest form, showing up for each other and being of use by lightening another’s load and elevating every participant’s spirits in the process. Parker makes a crucial distinction: “We literally have a self-help revolution, but self-help doesn’t actually help us answer the questions of our shared life. What we actually need is also tools for group help.”
“People want to be of use, not used… A lot of people don’t even think anyone needs them. It’s so lonely.”
-Priya Parker
|
|
| What I’m Reading: Connection as Spiritual Practice
Lisa Miller’s work on relational spirituality in The Awakened Brain offers a deeper dimension to why gathering matters. Miller, a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia, has compiled compelling research showing that spirituality, which she defines broadly as “any time you feel held or inspired by something greater than yourself,” protects us from depression and anxiety to a higher degree than any other mental health intervention.
What does this have to do with connection? Everything.
Miller’s research shows that when mother and child were both high in spirituality, the child was 80% protected against depression. A child is five times less likely to be depressed if spiritual life is shared with a mother. Spirituality, she argues, is fundamentally relational. We discover the transcendent not just alone in meditation or prayer, but in and through our connections with others. A moment of deep connection with another being. A surge of connection at a concert or sporting event. The synchronicity of a stranger who says exactly what you needed to hear.
Miller also describes two modes of awareness. The first is “achieving” mode, the transactional, goal-oriented state most of us live in most of the time, especially in winter when survival feels imperative. The second is “awakened” awareness, a state that values and nurtures relationships, sees profound meaning in connection, and understands ourselves as part of something larger. The invitation of spring is to shift from one to the other.
When we gather with intention, when we show up for each other, when we create spaces where people can be truly seen and heard, we are not just being social. We’re participating in something sacred. |
|
| What I’m Contemplating: Moving Past “How Are You?”
Therapist Kathleen Smith recently wrote about a challenge she set for herself. Could she go a week without asking anyone “How are you?”. The question itself has become so perfunctory that it invites inauthentic answers such as, “I’m fine”, or “Good. How are you?”. Questions like “How are you?” don’t often invite genuine connection and often leave me feeling unsatisfied.
Smith, in her thoughtful newsletter, asks what counts as real contact? What questions actually invite people into authentic dialogue rather than dismiss them with a perfunctory question. Her alternative suggestions include:
- Have you had any interesting challenges lately?
- What have you been thinking about today?
- Have you gone on any “deep dives” lately?
- What do you want me to know about what’s going on with you?
Or even more radically, start with answering a question about yourself. “My husband and I just returned from a quick getaway in St. John and we discovered our new favorite hike in the world. We hiked Ram Head Trail over a rocky beach and up to a 200 foot bluff where we had a 360 degree view of the Caribbean. It was breathtaking and exhilarating. It reinforced for me my need to be outdoors and discover new adventures. What’s your latest adventure?”
I’ve been thinking about this notion of more pointed and less perfunctory questions in context of emergence from winter where I was primarily drawn inward. How many times did I ask “How are you?” without making real connection. How many times did I miss making genuine contact because I was in “get things done” mode rather than in awakened awareness?
Smith writes that one of the reasons that people love therapy is that they are treated like their thinking and their challenges are interesting. You don’t need to be a therapist to offer that kind of attention to someone. You just need to be present and fully engaged in your conversation. |
|
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
—Anaïs Nin
|
| What I’m Committing To: Planting Seeds
Spring is the season of planting. Of beginning. Of emergence. We don’t need to wait for perfect conditions. We just need to start.
So as the ice melts and the days lengthen, I’m making my own commitments:
- I’m committing to host a gathering this spring. Not when the house is clean or the recipe is perfected, but now. With dog hair and all.
- I’m committing to ask better questions. To move past, “How are you?” and toward real contact. To be present and fully engaged.
- I’m committing to notice the synchronicities. To practice awakened awareness. To remember that showing up for each other is a sacred practice.
My antidote to “wintering” is getting out, to reconnect, and to show up. It’s the willingness to emerge, like the lotus coming out of the mud, knowing when it’s time to bloom.
What seeds will you plant this spring? |
|
|
Essential Leadership
Essential Leadership works with individuals and families to crystalize their values, magnify their voice, and create their vision for how they will positively impact the world.
What is essential? .
When you identify what is really essential to you, you can eliminate everything else, and make the execution of what really matters as effortless as possible. Knowing what is essential is the disciplined pursuit of less. It allows you to channel your time, energy and effort toward making the highest possible contribution to what really matters.
Why leadership?
When you know your essence, you will identify what speaks to your soul. You rise as a leader in your own sphere of influence, even if you never saw yourself as or aspired to become a “leader” in the traditional sense of the word. You align your passions, your purpose, your life. When you are clear about your vision and strategies for action, you can become a potent force for good. In doing so, you will motivate and inspire others to engage in that vision.
|
|
|
|
|
