The ‘How’ Matters
This year broke me open. Losing my sister in May stripped me to the studs, changing the way I understand strength, love, and presence. Grief keeps reshaping me, and through it all one particular truth has become undeniably clear: the how matters. How we meet what hurts. How we show up for one another. How we stay with what life asks of us.
Most Fridays my parents, Deanna’s husband, and I gather for dinner and her favorite card game. We tell stories that still catch in our throats. These nights have become a quiet anchor. A reminder that love practiced in small, steady ways is its own kind of grace. The circles around us have held us too: neighbors, friends, colleagues, clients, old connections, and my sister’s friends who have taken me in as their own. Their care has steadied the ground beneath us. The way we were able to sing together at Deanna’s Celebration of Life keeps moving through me.
I recently stepped back into a wider community at the Fall Gathering at Commonweal in California. It was my first multi-day, in-person group experience since before Covid, as I had continued a low-level self-quarantine for my sister long after the world reopened. Spending three days in a room of more than sixty people felt like a threshold crossing.
What met me there surprised me. The generosity of spirit. The ease. The simple warmth in how people treated one another. The depth of regard. I hadn’t realized until being immersed in this kind of experience just how long it had been since feeling this way in a group context.
It threw into sharp contrast the ever-present-tension of the past decade through which I’ve experienced so many well-intended gatherings of folks hardened—with differences magnified to fracturing, deep vigilance taking root, people bracing for impact, more “at” each other than “with” each other. As a leader of a retreat center that gathered upwards of 80 groups per year for several days together at a time, that vigilance took root in my body.
This gathering was oxygen. An embrace. A softening. There was a sense of tiredness with scrutinizing one another’s purity. Rather, there was a palpable commitment to weave accountability with dignity. Kindness. Kindness, kindness, kindness. Laughter. Real conversation. It underlined for me again: the how matters as much as the what.
To be clear: this was not about niceness. Niceness has its own nasty underbelly of manipulation, repression, and control. What I am speaking to is deeper. Meeting one another as whole humans. Essence to essence. Dignity to dignity. As complex, multi-faceted beings.
I felt this at the gathering.
And I feel it in my family as we learn how to navigate our way forward through our grief. I feel it in my partnership. I am feeling it in my friendships. And… I am feeling it within myself.
Grief brought me so far down that I could no longer hide from the parts of me that have long hungered for this quality of kindness within me. In this stripped-back place, I have connected with a more generous way of relating with myself.
Perhaps, then, what’s softening is me.
And from this place, the world feels less terrible… even amidst the vast terribleness. I am taunted by fewer hooks that I am tempted to bite. Cruel or careless words aren’t grabbing my heart and attention like they used to. I don’t feel the impulse to diminish anyone else out of grasping for my own sense of safety.
More rooted in my own dignity, I feel an expanded capacity to genuinely honor others’. I can more frequently walk the talk that I have been talking for decades.
Still… I gotta say: the moments when this quality of collective regard is shared are extraordinary. Delicious. Nourishing. When the how and the what line up, something so powerful rises. A feeling that we truly have one another’s backs. Across difference. After being immersed in such a field for three days, I find myself wishing it for all of us, all of the time.
As we embrace our own dignity within ourselves, we DO have more capacity to honor it around us. As we meet ourselves in this way, we meet each other this way. As we meet each other in this way, the how becomes real, potent, and powerful ground to stand on.
The how becomes the path forward.
That’s how much it matters.
Photo: my feet after I bumped into a rock—painted the same bright blue as my shoes—left by some kind soul along a path I walk often.
