Reflections on self-discovery as an inward journey — the identity and awareness that emerge when you slow down enough to actually look. These posts explore where self-discovery and the contemplative life meet.

The Work That Holds Everything Together

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A CONVERSATION WITH DR. DON AJENÉ WILCOXSON · PART TWO OF THREE

A Man Who Stands in the Room

On teaching, spiritual direction, and what it means to carry many callings at once

There is a question I have wanted to ask Ajené for years, and as we continue our 3 part conversation I finally asked it when we sat down together: what is the connective tissue across everything you do? Because from where I sit, the list is remarkable. Distinguished Professor at Riverside City College — recently elevated to Professor Emeritus after more than three decades. Spiritual director. Six Seconds EQ faculty. Enneagram teacher. Minister. Business consultant. Dream worker trained in the Jungian mystical tradition at the Haden Institute. Scuba diver, salsa dancer, Lego builder, student of classical guitar.

He smiled at the question. Then he said something I have been turning over ever since.

“Emotional intelligence is intertwined with who I am at a soul level. One moves the other. From this perspective, I am passionate about living and teaching how to experience a soul-centered emotionally intelligent life.”

That is the connective tissue. Not a set of skills or roles, but a way of being — the conviction that what we feel and what we believe and how we treat the people in front of us are not separate compartments but a single integrated life. Everything Ajené does flows from that integration.

The classroom is where I have seen him described most often by others, and the descriptions are strikingly consistent. His dean at RCC said he has a natural ability to connect with his students — that he “allows students to find solace in his presence when they are struggling.” The Accreditation Council for Business Schools and Programs recognized him with their Teaching Excellence Award; he was one of only twenty faculty nationwide to receive it that year. But when you ask Ajené what he is doing in the classroom, he does not talk about pedagogy. He talks about presence.

“The classroom is the students’ space, not mine,” he told me. “I enter their space with respect. I leave my own baggage outside the door so I can meet them where they are.” His approach is rooted in listening rather than answers — in the recognition that every person arriving in that room is carrying something, and that learning cannot happen until the person feels held.

This is, at its core, an emotional intelligence practice. In the Six Seconds model, the capacity to “increase empathy” — to genuinely enter another person’s experience before responding to it — is one of the deepest and most difficult competencies to develop. Ajené has built a classroom around it. And notably, he has done this in a business and entrepreneurship department, which is not the first place most people would look for this kind of formation work. That gap between where it is expected and where he practices it is, I think, part of the point.

The spiritual direction practice carries the same posture into a different room. Ajené works with people across Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, and no-tradition backgrounds — a range that reflects his own formation. He grew up with a mother who was Jehovah’s Witness, a father who was Buddhist, a grandmother who was Baptist, an uncle who was Muslim, and a Catholic school. His doctorate from New York Theological Seminary was in interfaith, inter-spiritual, and intercultural theology — not because he chose a specialty, but because he was already living at that intersection and needed language for it.

He describes his approach to spiritual diversity through a Baha’i image: the most beautiful garden is a mixture of flowers. He is not interested in resolving difference into uniformity. He is interested in what each tradition offers to the whole — and in holding space wide enough that a person from any background can find their own ground.

“The most beautiful gardens are a mixture of flowers. I see my own spiritual life that way — enriched by every stream, not threatened by any of them.”

His work as a Enneagram coach sits at the center of all of this. The Enneagram tradition is distinctive in that it asks real people to speak from their own lived experience of a type — not to have a type explained to them, but to hear from those who inhabit it. Ajené is a Nine, the Peacemaker, and he brings to that work a rare self-awareness about both the gift and the cost of his type. Nines tend to minimize their own needs and giftedness in service of harmony. They absorb the priorities of others. They can mistake self-erasure for humility.

When I asked him where his Nine-ness serves him most and where it costs him most, he was characteristically honest. The gift: the capacity to enter any room and genuinely see every person in it, to hold multiple realities at once without needing to collapse them into a winner. The cost: the temptation to smooth over things that need to be said, to defer his own voice when it is exactly his voice that is required. He is aware of both. That awareness is itself the work.

He describes his current life season as winter — and he is careful to define what he means. Not decline. Not retreat. Spaciousness. The steadiness that comes from having built something over decades and knowing now what matters. He hopes, he told me, for more presence over productivity, more wisdom than certainty, more accompaniment over expertise. And the phrase that has stayed with me: not trying to become more but learning to become enough.

That phrase does a particular kind of work on me, because it runs counter to almost everything our culture tells us about professional life. Enough is not a word our productivity-saturated age handles well. But for a man who has earned Distinguished Professor status and a national teaching award and a doctorate and a spiritual direction practice and three decades of student relationships — for that man to say he is learning to become enough — that is not resignation. That is a different kind of ambition entirely.

There is a thread in the contemplative tradition — I am thinking of Thomas Merton, of Howard Thurman, of the desert fathers and mothers — about the movement from doing to being, from accumulation to presence. Ajené is living that transition with his eyes open. He knows what season he is in. And he is choosing to inhabit it rather than fight it.

In our next conversation, we will go to the harder places. The grief he carries about racial injustice. The threats he faced in high school for speaking up. The discrimination he encountered at the institution where he would go on to build one of the most distinguished careers in its history. And his word — direct and unhurried — to the people standing at the edge of the room, wondering whether there is a place for them.

But here, in this middle movement, I want to simply name what I see when I look at his life whole: a man who has refused, across decades and contexts, to let his work be less than his faith. That refusal is its own kind of witness.

To get in touch with Ajene use this link. mailto:ajene@donajene.com

If you are curious about how emotional intelligence and the Enneagram can deepen your own integration of work, faith, and presence, we would love to continue the conversation at spiritofeq.com.

Peace and every good.

 

The Garden He Grew from Honest Contradiction

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Post One:   The Garden He Grew From

Formation, the village of mentors, and the name given by a king

Post Two:   A Man Who Stands in the Room

Teaching, spiritual direction, EQ practice, and the soul-centered integrated life

Post Three:  When the Whisper Is Louder Than the Fear

Racial injustice, the cost of speaking, grief, and the word for those at the edge of the room

 

A CONVERSATION WITH DR. DON AJENÉ WILCOXSON · PART ONE OF THREE

The Garden He Grew From

What hard soil and an unlikely village made of one remarkable man

There is a photograph I keep returning to in my mind — not a real one, but the kind your imagination makes when someone tells you a story about a boy walking to school alone, afraid, and arriving anyway. I have known Dr. Don Ajené Wilcoxson for years. I know the man he became. But it was only when we sat down together for a long conversation that I began to understand the terrain that formed him.

He described his childhood plainly, without self-pity, in the way that people speak about hard things they have long since made peace with. Physical abuse. A biological father he never met. The daily threat of being beaten walking to school. He called it “really challenging.” What stayed with me was not the weight of those words but the steadiness with which he carried them — the way a man speaks about weather he has already walked through.

“I was blessed,” he said, and meant it. Because running alongside those hardships was something else: a community of people who saw him and chose to stay.

His adoptive father became, in his words, “the best thing that could ever happen” to his life — a man who taught him about all cultures, all music, all the beautiful width of what it means to be human.

There was also Dell Roberts, a friend who showed him what it looks like for a young Black man to move through the world with dignity. His mother, who helped him find stillness. His godmother, who taught him ethics — not as rules, but as a way of being. And his nana, who pressed into him the twin practices of listening and caring. He didn’t point to a single turning point the way we often hope people will. He pointed instead to a village.

There is a concept in the Enneagram — and Ajené is a deeply self-aware Nine — about the way the Peacemaker absorbs the world around them, becoming, in some sense, an amalgam of the people they love. What he described from his childhood is not just biography. It is the formation of a man who would go on to hold space for people from every tradition, every background, every wound — and do it with the naturalness of someone who learned to navigate difference before he could name it.

He was the darkest member of his family. Extended family and outsiders noticed. He noticed. And rather than letting that experience narrow him, it became a doorway. “It taught me to navigate that difference,” he said, “and that helped me work across cultures and faiths later.” What looked, from the outside, like a wound had quietly become a gift.

This is the movement that the Six Seconds emotional intelligence framework calls “exercising optimism” — not the naive insistence that things are fine, but the practiced discipline of asking what is generative alongside what is broken. Ajené did not learn this from a book. He learned it the way most lasting things are learned: by living through something hard and refusing to let it be the last word.

The name Ajené arrived later. He was in his mid-twenties, teaching, when an African king whose daughter had been moved by his work gave him the name. It means, roughly, “a businessman who truths” — which Ajené himself acknowledged is something of an oxymoron, a contradiction held together by purpose. He carries that name now not as an identity to perform but as a reminder. Something higher, he said, is always calling him in everything he does.

“The name is a constant reminder that I have something higher that is calling me in everything I do.”

That sense of calling runs through everything that follows: the classroom, the sanctuary, the spiritual direction session, the emotional intelligence coaching circle. But it began here, in the soil of a childhood that was genuinely difficult and genuinely held — held by a father who taught him wonder, a friend who modeled dignity, a grandmother who modeled listening, a godmother who modeled integrity.

There is a phrase from the Celtic tradition that has long moved me: the idea that what we are is not something we construct alone, but something we receive — from the land, from the ancestors, from the people who pray over us before we know we need praying over. Ajené did not use that language, but he described that reality. He is, in a deep sense, a man made by his village.

And the village made something extraordinary. A man who enters rooms prepared to meet whoever is already inside. A man who learned, before he had words for it, that difference is not a problem to be solved but a garden to be tended. A man who was given a name that named him more truly than he could have named himself — and who has spent the decades since trying to live worthy of it.

On Wednesday and Thursday, we will follow Ajené into the classroom and the sanctuary, into his work at the intersection of emotional intelligence and spiritual formation, and into the harder places — the grief he carries about racial injustice, the cost of speaking when silence would be easier, and what keeps the pilot light lit even now. But this is where we begin: with the boy, and the village, and the soil that made him.

The boy walked to school afraid and arrived anyway. That was, perhaps, the first lesson.

To get in touch with Ajene use this link.ajene@donajene.com

If this reflection stirred something in you, we invite you to explore the work of emotional intelligence and spiritual formation at spiritofeq.com and mystical seeker.substack.com

Peace and every good.

When the Map Runs Out………

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When the Map Runs Out: Finding Your Way Through the Desert In-Between

On liminal seasons, sacred disorientation, and the slow work of becoming

There is a moment — if you have ever been truly lost — when the map in your hand stops making sense. The road it promises isn’t there. The landmarks don’t match. And you realize, with a strange mix of dread and something almost like relief, that you have entered unmapped territory.

That is the desert. Not necessarily sand and scorching heat, though those images carry real weight across ancient wisdom traditions. The desert is any season where the familiar landmarks disappear — where the identity you carried into a transition no longer fits, and the one you will carry out has not yet taken shape. Theologians and contemplatives have long called it the wilderness. Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep named it liminality, from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. You are on the threshold. Neither here nor there. The door is open, but you haven’t stepped through.

I have lived in that doorway. In different seasons, I found myself between jobs, between marriages, and navigating the slow aftermath of a health crisis — like pancreatitis, which has a way of stripping everything to bare essentials with very little ceremony. Each loss arrived not as a single blow but as a kind of systemic unraveling. What I thought I knew about myself, about my direction, about what I was building — all of it came into question at once.

What I did not expect was that the desert would become a teacher.

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The Threshold Has a Name

Liminal space is the technical name for the in-between — the transitional zone that exists between what was and what will be. Van Gennep first mapped it in his study of rites of passage: every significant human transition, he observed, moves through three phases. There is separation from the old identity, a liminal period of disorientation and becoming, and eventually reincorporation into a new form.

The middle phase — the liminal — is not a waiting room. It is a crucible.

 

Ancient traditions knew this. The Hebrew Bible is full of desert wandering — forty years for a people who needed to become something they were not yet. Moses on Sinai. Elijah under the broom tree. Jesus in the wilderness before the beginning of his public ministry. The desert, in these stories, is never incidental. It is the point. Something essential is being formed that could not have been formed any other way.

The desert fathers and mothers — those early Christian monastics who literally fled to the Egyptian wilderness in the third and fourth centuries — went to the desert on purpose. They understood that the stripping of comfort was not punishment but preparation. What could not be heard in the noise of ordinary life could sometimes be heard in the silence of the barren places.

“The desert is unadorned. It removes noise and clutter allowing you to reevaluate your values and focus on what is truly essential.”

I did not choose my desert. Most of us don’t. But I did, eventually, choose how to inhabit it.

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What the Desert Actually Does

There is a temptation, when you are in a liminal season, to treat it as a problem to be solved. To scramble for the next thing, the next role, the next relationship — anything to end the suspension. I understand that impulse deeply. The in-between is uncomfortable in ways that are hard to articulate to people who are not in it.

 

 

But the desert has purposes that cannot be rushed.

It strips away self-reliance. When the external scaffolding of identity falls away — the job title, the relationship, the health you assumed — you are brought into contact with something deeper. Who are you when you are not who you were? That question, honestly held, is one of the most spiritually generative questions a person can carry.

It establishes roots. A plant in the desert sends its root system down far deeper than plants in well-watered soil. It must, to survive. Liminal seasons do something similar in us. The roots we grow in the in-between often reach depths we would never have explored in ordinary seasons.

It offers distillation. The desert is ruthlessly clarifying. What matters to you? What were you carrying that was never really yours to carry? What were you building toward that came from someone else’s vision for your life? The desert asks these questions quietly and persistently, and if you are still enough to hear them, the answers begin to come.

During my own desert season, I found myself returning again and again to contemplative practices — extended periods of silence, long walks without destination. Not as escape, but as a form of listening. I was learning to let the quiet do its work.

The emotional intelligence framework Lynette and I work with at spirit of EQ has a concept that became very real to me during this time: the difference between reaction and response. In a liminal season, there is enormous pressure to react — to fill the silence, to fix the disorientation, to manufacture certainty. Learning to pause, to stay present to what is really happening rather than what you fear might happen, is one of the deepest EQ practices I know. And the desert is where I learned it at a cellular level.

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Learning to Look for Small Signs of Life

One of the most important practices I developed in those seasons was what I can only describe as desert botany — the discipline of looking for small signs of life in apparently barren ground.

The desert is never as empty as it first appears. It is full of life that has adapted to scarcity, that blooms in small and unexpected ways, that knows how to wait. When I stopped looking for the dramatic turnaround — the moment when everything would resolve — and started looking for the small green shoots, something shifted.

A conversation that went deeper than I expected. A morning of clarity after weeks of fog. A friendship that appeared out of nowhere and offered exactly what was needed. A passage from a desert father that named something I hadn’t been able to name.

Julian of Norwich, writing from her own experience of suffering and disorientation, offered words I returned to often: that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Not as denial of the present difficulty, but as an orientation toward a goodness that exists beyond the current view. The desert does not last forever. It has a purpose, and when that purpose is accomplished, a new season comes.

But the new season is shaped by how we inhabit the desert. Those who fight it or flee it arrive depleted. Those who learn to dwell in it — not comfortably, but honestly — often arrive at the other side with something they could not have acquired any other way.

Desert Journal Worksheet Link

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A Practice for the In-Between: The Three Questions

This exercise is best done slowly, with a journal or open space for reflection. Allow at least twenty minutes. There are no right answers — only honest ones.

The desert fathers practiced a form of structured self-inquiry they called examen — a slow, honest review of what was present, what was absent, and what was stirring beneath the surface. This exercise draws on that tradition.

Settle first. Before you begin, take three slow breaths. Release the urgency of solving anything. You are here to notice, not to fix.

Question One: What has been stripped away?

Name, without judgment, the things that have fallen away in this season — roles, relationships, certainties, identities. Don’t evaluate whether their loss is deserved or fair. Simply name them.

Question Two: What remains?

When the stripping has been named, turn your attention to what has not been taken. What is still true? What in you has endured? These are often the things that matter most — the ones the desert is revealing rather than removing.

Question Three: What small sign of life can you see today?

Not a resolution. Not a next step. Just one small sign — a glimmer, a green shoot, a moment of clarity or connection. If you cannot see one today, that is honest information too. Write it down.

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The Map Will Come

I am on the other side of that desert for now — or perhaps more accurately, I am in a different landscape, carrying what I learned in the in-between. The job that came after that season shaped Lynette and me into what we now call spirit of EQ. The health crisis that stripped my certainty about my physical resilience also deepened my empathy for people navigating their own fragility. The relational losses became — slowly, painfully, eventually — the soil from which something more honest grew.

I don’t want to romanticize the desert. It was hard. There were stretches of genuine desolation. But I also don’t want to minimize what it gave me — a set of roots that go deeper than anything I had before, a clarity about what matters, and a capacity to sit with others in their own liminal seasons without needing to rush them out the door.

If you are in the in-between right now — between who you were and who you are becoming, in a season of dryness, disorientation, or loss — I want you to know two things. First: you are not lost. You are in unmapped territory, which is a different thing entirely. And second: the map will come. It is being drawn, even now, by the roots you are growing.

The threshold is not the end of the journey. It is the most important part of it.

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Peace and every good.

 

Today Is Hard. Tomorrow Is Worse. Why I Kept Going

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The Day After Tomorrow

There is a photograph I keep in my mind from the early days of Varment Guard — not an actual photograph, just the image burned in from living it. It’s a door. A plain commercial door, nothing fancy about it, with a small wooden frame above it. And inside that frame, four words someone had taken the time to put there deliberately: Failure was not an option.

Mike M. and I had been meeting for eight months before we ever turned a key in a lock. Eight months of yellow legal pads and bad coffee and spreadsheets that kept being wrong and late-night conversations that neither of us was willing to end because ending felt like quitting. We were two people trying to think of everything — preparing the way you prepare for something that matters — and when we finally opened those doors, we discovered we hadn’t thought of even half of what was coming for us.

THE FOUNDERS HONEST LOOK WORKBOOK

That’s when Jack Ma’s words would have hit differently. “Today is hard and tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine.” — Jack Ma, Founder, Alibaba Group.

Hold that sentence for a moment. It isn’t a motivational poster. It’s a map.

WHAT’S BEHIND THE WORDS

Jack Ma didn’t build Alibaba from a position of ease or advantage. He was rejected by Harvard ten times. When KFC came to his city and hired 23 of 24 applicants, he was the one they passed on. China’s first public internet company turned him away. When he finally pitched the idea of an online marketplace for Chinese small businesses in 1999, he did it in his apartment, to a handful of friends who weren’t completely sure they believed him. He knew today is hard the way you only know something you’ve actually lived.

The history of business is, at its marrow, a history of stubborn people who refused to let a bad today become a permanent condition. Henry Ford failed twice before building the company that changed manufacturing forever. Milton Hershey lost everything in New York and again in Chicago before returning home to Pennsylvania with nothing but a process he still believed in. Walt Disney was told he lacked imagination by the very newspaper that had hired him. The pattern is so consistent it might seem like a cliché — except for the people living it. For them, it never feels like a pattern. It feels personal. It feels like an exception. It feels like it might be permanent.

What the ones who make it through seem to understand — sometimes while it’s happening, sometimes only years later — is that the difficulty is not a detour from the path. It is the path. The hard is not a sign you’ve chosen wrong. More often, it’s a sign you’ve chosen something real.

WHAT WE KNEW AND WHAT WE DIDN’T

When Mike and I opened Varment Guard, we believed we were ready for the hard. What we hadn’t prepared for was the texture of it. Not the spreadsheet problems — those were almost welcome, because spreadsheets have answers. It was everything else. The family dinners missed, and then just stopped being expected. The friendships that didn’t end loudly — they just went quiet because you weren’t available and eventually people found their rhythm without you. The money questions that didn’t arrive as dramatic crises but as a low, grinding background hum that followed you everywhere, even into sleep.

Nobody writes that part down. Not honestly. Because the real story of building something is longer and more irregular than any narrative shape can hold, and no one wants to tell you how much it costs before you’ve decided to pay it — because if they did, maybe fewer people would start.

So why did we do it?

Why does anyone?

The easy answers are all true: we believed in the idea, we wanted to build something that was ours, we wanted to see if we could. But the real answer lives underneath all of those. It has to do with identity. With the recognition that there was a version of life available — something that matched what was inside you — and that settling for something smaller would be a slow erosion you weren’t willing to live with. We did it because the alternative was becoming someone we didn’t recognize. And that felt worse than everything that came with the doing.

WHAT WE GAINED AND WHAT WE LOST

What did we gain? That part comes easier now than it did in the middle of it. We built something real — a company with a culture, a reputation, a set of values that held through hard seasons. Over the years, Varment Guard employed hundreds of people. Families were fed. Skills were developed. Careers were built that might not have existed otherwise. There is no dollar figure for any of that. And there is something else, quieter but just as real: you find out what you are actually made of. You discover your own capacity. You learn what you can carry. You don’t find that out any other way. No shortcut delivers it. Only the going does.

What did we lose? That one is easier in the dark than in the daylight. Sleep, certainly — and the kind of easy rest that comes when you’re not carrying something large. Margin, regularly. Time with people we loved, which you cannot really reclaim even if the relationships survived. Parts of yourself that were softer and more patient that got traded, over time, for something harder and faster and more efficient. I won’t call all of it loss, exactly. But I notice the absence of some of it. I think that’s worth naming honestly.

HOW TO KEEP GOING WHEN YOU FEEL ALONE

DAY AFTER TOMORROW WORKBOOK

Here is the part no one tells you about keeping going when you feel like you’re carrying it entirely by yourself: you are. You actually are. And that’s not a crisis — that’s the position.

Every person who has built anything real has sat in a room where no one else fully grasped what they were holding. Not the advisors. Not the investors. Not even the partners — because it’s your specific weight, shaped to your specific frame, and no one else quite feels it the same way. You can resent that solitude or you can learn to read it as information.

What it’s telling you is simple: the decision to continue is yours. Which means it cannot be taken from you. The market can’t take it. A bad quarter can’t take it. A difficult competitor can’t take it. A hard year can’t take it. Only you can put it down.

Jack Ma is telling you something real when he promises sunshine on the third day. But he’s also telling you something harder: you have to make it through the first two. Not around them. Not above them. Through them.

The frame above that door at Varment Guard wasn’t decoration. It was a daily instruction — renewed every morning when someone walked under it. Failure is not an option doesn’t mean failure is impossible. It means you’ve decided in advance that however bad today gets, and however much worse tomorrow is, you are not stopping here. The sunshine isn’t guaranteed. But it’s only available to the ones who are still there when it arrives.

Mike and I didn’t think of half the things that would come for us. But we had made a decision. And on the hardest days, honestly, the decision was the only thing.

Make the decision. Keep making it. The day after tomorrow is real.

Peace and every good.

The Chairman Thought I Wasn’t Paying Attention

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Picture a waiting room. You’ve been there five minutes, and without meaning to, you’ve already written a story about everyone in it — the man with the expensive watch who checks his phone every thirty seconds, the woman with paint on her jeans who hasn’t looked up from her book, the teenager in the corner with earbuds in like armor. You haven’t spoken to any of them. You may never speak to any of them. But somewhere in the architecture of your brain, a file has opened on each one, and it is filling itself in without your permission.

This is what we do. It is fast, it is mostly unconscious, and — here is the part that costs us — we tend to trust it.

Confirmation bias is the cognitive shortcut that turns a glance into a verdict. Once we’ve formed an impression, we filter everything through it, collecting evidence that confirms what we already believe and quietly discarding what doesn’t fit. The psychologist Leon Festinger spent decades helping us understand how fiercely the mind protects its working assumptions — not because it is lazy, but because uncertainty is expensive. The brain is a prediction machine, and prediction requires categories. The trouble is that people are not categories. They are houses you have never been inside, and the front door tells you almost nothing about what’s in the rooms.

It causes me to think about the ways I’ve been filed.

I was asked to lead a financial committee for an international organization. In the first meeting, I was the quietest person in the room. I tend to listen before I speak, to let the space fill before I take up any of it. I was watching. I was also reading — the numbers that weren’t adding up, the relationships between people that were bent in ways that take time to see, the kind of bent that looks like warmth from a distance but reads differently when you’re close and paying attention. Embezzlement. Alliances that were costing the organization more than they were protecting it. I could see it, and I called it out.

The room exploded.

What I learned later — from the chairman himself — was that he had watched me sit quietly when he asked me to be on “the committee” I wasn’t really present and could not tell what was going on. That my stillness read as absence. That I could be managed, even manipulated, and that bringing in someone so apparently passive had been, in his mind, a calculated move toward a controllable outcome.

He had filed me. Quickly, confidently, and very wrong.

I am not the first person this has happened to. You are not either.

Think about the moments you’ve been looked past — the job interview where someone’s eyes glazed before you finished your first sentence, the meeting where your idea was ignored until someone else said it twenty minutes later, the day you walked into a room in the wrong clothes for the assumptions people had already formed about you. Your hair too natural, your accent too layered, your stillness too unreadable, your energy too large. The label arrives before you do, and it does not ask for your input. It does not ask for your history, your interior life, your gifts, or your grief. It just lands, and it sticks, and quietly it shapes every interaction that follows.

The philosopher Martin Buber, my fav, spent much of his intellectual life writing about what he called I-Thou and I-It encounters — the difference between meeting someone as a full subject, irreducible and alive, and relating to them as an object, a role, a function, a category. Most of our daily encounters, Buber admitted honestly, are I-It. The world moves fast; we cannot hold everyone in full attention at every moment. But the cost is real. We move through life surrounded by people we have reduced to fit the size of our assumptions, and we call that knowing them.

The label is not the person. The label is a shortcut we mistake for a destination.

There is a practice I’ve come to think of as staying curious past the first sentence. Not the performance of curiosity — the enthusiastic head-tilt and the “Tell me more” — but the actual discipline of holding your impression lightly, the way you’d hold a rough draft: with interest, not authority. And this is what real coaches do. It tells you something. It does not tell you everything. The quiet person in the room is watching. The loud one is sometimes afraid. The polished one is held together with things you cannot see. The disheveled one has already solved a problem you haven’t noticed yet. Every label you apply is a door you close, and some of those doors open onto entire worlds.

What Josh Freeman of the emotional intelligence company Six Seconds has trained us to do here is not to have certainty but curiosity — not the confident read, but the open question. It asks us to notice what our brain wants to do with a stranger in the first thirty seconds and then, gently, invite it to wait. To ask a question we don’t already know the answer to. To sit with not-knowing long enough to find out who’s in the room.

The chairman’s assumption about me wasn’t malicious. It was human. But it was a choice — and choice is where practice lives.

When I left that boardroom after the explosion, I wasn’t angry. I was, in a strange way, grateful — because what had just happened was the clearest possible evidence that the quiet person had been paying the most attention. The label had failed. The person it was attached to had not. I walked out still whole, still present, still myself. And whatever the chairman thought he had managed had just become the thing that managed him.

That is always the risk when we label. The person inside the box tends to be larger than the box. And eventually — not always, not on our timeline, but eventually — they will show you.

Mystery Workbook Link Here

So the next time you sit across from someone, in a meeting, at a table, on a commute, in a waiting room, try this: let them be unknown a little longer. Let the file stay open. Notice what your brain wants to do and then invite it to wait. Ask a question you don’t already know the answer to.

The person across from you is always a mystery.

That is not a problem to solve. It is an invitation to pay attention.

Come continue the conversation in the community where these ideas live — [link here].

Peace and every good.

Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957)

Martin Buber, I and Thou (1923; trans. Walter Kaufmann, 1970)

From the Frats to the Hippies: How Not Belonging Taught Me to See

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Good Enough for This Life

Do you ever think about whether you are good enough for this life?

I ask it that way on purpose — not “good enough at your job” or “good enough for the relationship” but for this life, the whole thing, the fact of being a particular kind of person moving through a world that was mostly built for a different kind of person. It is a question I have carried for a long time. And I want to tell you where it came from, because the origin of this story matters.

Picture a room full of people who seem to know where to stand. You are at the edge, not by design but because the middle arrived too fast and too loud, because you are already receiving the room — not just the nearest conversation but every conversation, the ambient emotional temperature, the undercurrent of music, the way the light is sitting differently on one side than the other. You are cataloging all of it without meaning to, because that is simply how your mind moves.

I know that room. I spent most of my adolescence looking for the group that would finally let me in — not merely tolerate me but receive what I was bringing. I tried the frats, with their crisp hierarchies and their belonging-by-exclusion, their handshakes and their unwritten ledgers of who counted. I tried the greasers, leather and bravado, a different code but a code all the same, enforced with the same quiet ferocity. I tried the soul brothers, drawn by the warmth and the music and the sense that community here might stretch wide enough to hold more kinds of people. And finally, tentatively, I found the hippies — loose-structured, philosophically suspicious of tight categories, practicing a kind of radical acceptance that was imperfect and sometimes chaotic but real. They were the closest thing to a fit I had found. And even there, I was only partly in.

What I didn’t understand then, standing at the edges of all those circles, was that the thing keeping me out was also the thing that made me able to see.

I have dyslexia and ADHD. Together. Which, if you’ve lived it, means the mind doesn’t run one stream of consciousness but several — simultaneous, layered, cross-referencing, sometimes chasing each other into corners before snapping back. The squirrel jokes are accurate. Mid-sentence, mid-thought, something peripheral catches your sight and suddenly you are somewhere else entirely, following a thread that no one else in the room can see.

What I couldn’t name as a teenager was the experience of receiving a conversation on six channels at once — the words someone was saying and the words they weren’t saying, the slight tension in their shoulders, the way their story didn’t quite line up with their eyes, the ambient emotional weather of the room, the connection to something said three exchanges ago that suddenly mattered now. All of it arriving at the same time. All of it real.

This was not comfortable. For years it was almost unbearable — the sensation of always arriving sideways to the conversation, unable to slow the intake down enough to meet people where they were. I tried to explain it, and it came out tangled. I tried to belong and it came out strange. Large parties still overwhelm me quickly; the signal-to-noise ratio collapses under too many inputs running at once, and I learned early to find the wall, the corner, the quieter edge where the room could be read rather than absorbed whole. And so, the question I carried — quietly, persistently, the way you carry things you cannot put down — was: Am I good enough for this?

Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, developed in the early 1980s, named what many people had quietly suspected: that intelligence is not a single axis running from less to more, but a wide range of distinct capacities — linguistic, spatial, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and more — that show up differently in different people, and are cultivated or suppressed depending on the environments those people move through. Ned Hallowell, who has written about ADHD from the inside for decades, describes it as a Ferrari engine with bicycle brakes: enormous processing power that simply needs a different kind of structure to channel it well. What both are pointing toward is this — the brain that struggles in one environment is often extraordinarily capable in another. Not as consolation. As fact.

The multiple streams I couldn’t turn off at parties became, in smaller rooms and deeper conversations, something closer to precision. I could hear what people meant underneath what they said. I could hold several threads at once and notice where they crossed without losing either. I could sit with someone in confusion and not rush them toward clarity, because I knew from the inside what it felt like to have the mind moving in many directions at once and not yet know which one was true. The gift and the difficulty were the same thing, running on the same hardware, expressed differently depending on context.

I think now about that teenager trying the frats and the greasers and the soul brothers and the hippies — not as someone who failed to find a home, but as someone learning, by accumulation and by refusal, what belonging required. It wasn’t a group that would tolerate him. It was a context in which his actual nature could be useful. The hippies came closest because they had, almost by philosophy, released the requirement to be one thing, to arrive in a straight line, to present a coherent and unified self at all times. They were practicing, imperfectly and sometimes chaotically, the idea that a loose structure could hold more kinds of people and more kinds of minds.

What I do now — working with people around emotional intelligence, around the interior life, around the persistent gap between who we are and who we think we should be — is built directly from those years of standing at the edges of rooms and learning to read them. The overwhelm at large gatherings is still real. The squirrels still appear. But I have learned to trust the multiple streams, to follow rather than fight them, to understand that the signal is often in the thing that looks like noise. Observation turns out to be one of the rarest things one person can offer another. And it was built, in me, precisely by not being comfortable in the middle.

So: do you ever think about whether you are good enough for this life?

Edge Of Room Workbook

Here is the reframe I want to offer — not a reassurance, not “of course you are, everyone is,” which is kind but lame and thin. Instead, the question assumes a standard that was probably never built for you. The thing you experience as a deficit — the way you process or move or think or feel that doesn’t match the room — may be exactly the mechanism by which you will eventually see most clearly.

I still sometimes find myself at the edge of a room, taking in more than I was asked to take in, following threads no one else is following. But I am no longer trying to get to the middle.

The edge, it turns out, is a very good place to observe from. And observation, it turns out, is exactly what most people are waiting for someone to offer them.

If this landed somewhere in you, the conversation continues at [Substack/Mighty Networks] — a community that keeps asking these same questions together.

Peace and every good.

Two Wounded Hands and the Gap We Still Must Close

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The Divine Touch of Connection: How a Single Image Holds a History, a Story, and a Call

My father was an artist of some renown. He drew an image like this during the turmoil of the 1960s to tell us something — and it was lost to history. I have tried to recreate it for us today. Make no mistake: this is quite a bit more than a religious statement.

There are images that simply depict an idea — and then there are images that enter the viewer’s life, carrying history, memory, and longing inside their composition. This picture, which my father called the divine touch of connection, does the latter. It shows only what matters most: two reaching hands, marked by wounds, suspended in a beam of golden light. Between them is a gap — small, tense, and full of meaning — like the moment just before forgiveness becomes real.

What makes this image so powerful is that it doesn’t ask you to choose one interpretation. It layers spiritual symbolism, human vulnerability, and historical resonance into one quiet act of reaching. And by dressing the hands in 20th-century clothing, it refuses to stay in the past. It insists that what the wounds and the light signify is not only ancient scripture. It is also modern life.

A History Written into Hands

Hands are among the oldest symbols humans have used to communicate — offering help, taking responsibility, giving blessing, or showing harm. In the world of Christian art, wounded hands are deeply recognizable. Nail marks call to mind crucifixion imagery, but artists traditionally place those images in a broader scene: the whole body, the cross, the crowd, the sky.

This image reduces the scene to hands only. That reduction is not an artistic limitation — it is a deliberate spiritual strategy. By isolating the hands and making the wounds central, the image suggests that suffering and redemption are not peripheral details. They are the core language of connection itself. The wounds are displayed as proof that love can survive pain.

But the image doesn’t stop at religious history. The hands wear 20th-century clothing — not the robes of antiquity. That single choice pulls the meaning forward into the modern era. It tells us: this is not a distant story. The image becomes a mirror for contemporary wounds, whether those wounds are racial, social, political, or personal. The sacred is not only in ancient narratives. It shows up in modern suffering and in modern attempts to heal.

The Story Within the Gap

The heart of the image is its almost-touching moment. Neither hand grips the other. Neither dominates. Both reach. The open posture communicates invitation rather than force, reconciliation rather than conquest. That matters, because many of the world’s conflicts — religious, political, racial — begin when one side grips and the other recoils.

Here the hands approach each other in suspended space. The scene is not contact already achieved. It is connection about to happen but not yet completed. That tension is emotionally accurate. Healing rarely arrives all at once. Reconciliation is a series of near moments, the apology that is almost spoken, the conversation that almost happens, the decision to see someone fully that almost follows through.

The golden light makes this suspension feel sacred. Darkness surrounds the hands, but the light concentrates on the space where connection is possible — hope emerging not because suffering is good, but because something holy can be born from it. The light suggests that mercy is not only a feeling. It is an action. Something that can be reached for.

Shared Suffering, Shared Grace

The wounds are more than reminders of an old story. When both hands carry nail marks, the image conveys a radical idea: suffering is not isolated.

In many traditional depictions, the wounds belong to one figure — Christ alone. Here, the image implies shared vulnerability. The pain is carried on both sides, so the scene becomes less about hierarchy and more about solidarity,suffering is shared, therefore compassion is shared.

That shift changes everything. If suffering belonged only to one person, viewers might feel safe distance. But when wounds appear on both sides, the image draws us into mutual recognition: we are not as separate as we pretend. Redemption begins inside the act of reaching — not after pain is resolved, but inside the willingness to remain present with wounds without hiding them, denying them, or wielding them as weapons.

True connection happens through vulnerability, not perfection.

Unity Across the Lines History Built

One of the most striking layers is the contrast between darker and lighter skin tones. Because the hands are visibly different, the image refuses to keep its meaning safely vague. It insists on unity across difference — across racial boundaries, across histories of separation, across the long American wound that my father watched bleed openly in the 1960s and that has never fully closed.

The visual contrast says: shared humanity exists despite different bodies, stories, and experiences. The wounds look similar in their meaning — proof that everyone understands pain. The sacred is not reserved for one group. Mercy is offered across every line that society polices.

This is where the image becomes socially resonant. The nail wounds point toward biblical crucifixion. The racial contrast points toward reconciliation that is still unfinished. Even viewers who never connect the image to specific political events can feel its moral insistence: compassion must cross the lines that history creates.

Why the Clothes Matter

If the hands were dressed like ancient figures, viewers might treat this as museum spirituality — something reverent but unreachable. The 20th-century clothing changes that. It says the wounds belong to our world. The work of reconciliation is not reserved for saints or scripture. It happens through ordinary conversations and ordinary choices: whether to see another person as fully human, whether to hold accountability, whether to respond to harm with truth and mercy rather than retaliation.

The modern clothing also transforms the golden light. It can still be read as divine presence — but it can also be read as the clarity that sometimes arrives when someone chooses to break a cycle of hostility. It becomes conscience illuminated: the moment a person sees the other not as an enemy but as a neighbor.

What My Father Knew — and What We Must Face

My father was deeply troubled by what he saw around him. He watched a nation fracture along lines of race and power. He watched people choose sides over choosing each other. He made this image because he believed something: that the gap between human hands was closeable — but only if people were willing to reach, willing to be seen in their wounds, and willing to stay in the difficult suspended space where healing lives.

I look at our world today and I see the same fractures. The same refusals. The same turning away. The same wounds being hidden or weaponized instead of brought into the light. My father’s image is not nostalgic. It is prophetic.

The Call for Us Might Be………

So here is the invitation — and I mean this with everything I have: do not sleepwalk through this moment.

The gap in this image is not decorative. It is the gap you live in every day — between what you believe about human dignity and what you do to protect it. Between the reconciliation you say you want and the conversation you keep postponing. Between the world you inherited and the world you are choosing, right now, by what you do and what you refuse to do.

The divine touch of connection is not something we observe. It is something we perform — with our actual hands, our actual voices, our actual choices about who we see and who we ignore.

Reach. Even when it costs something. Especially then.

Because the light in this image does not belong to the past. It belongs to whoever is willing, today, to close the gap.

Peace and Every Good.

“The Gap Between Good Intentions and Real Justice”

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Dr. King, “Sincere Ignorance,” and the Work of Becoming Intelligent

There’s a moment I keep returning to—quiet, ordinary, and surprisingly revealing. A conversation starts with goodwill. People want fairness. They want safety. They want to be decent. Then the same pattern appears facts arrive without their context, a few details get trimmed, and the outcome starts to feel inevitable. What stays with me afterward isn’t only the disagreement. It’s the question: Who is willing to look closer?

Growing up in Detroit in the ’60s, I learned early that social justice isn’t abstract—it’s something you watch unfold in real time. July 1967 lives in me like a knot that never fully unties. I was playing ball at Palmer Park when I looked east and saw smoke rising from the direction of my house. My body understood something was wrong before my mind could name it. I ran home through smoke and fire, searching for friends and neighbors—and finding some of them too late.

The unrest of not looking closer had finally exploded in riot.

I also lived next door to neighbors who looked different than me but carried the same human needs: fear when things worsened, hope when someone promised change, love for family, and a dignity they never asked anyone to grant—only to recognize.

That’s why Dr. King’s words land so gently and so powerfully—not as condemnation, but as an invitation to wake up.

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. We have a responsibility to be intelligent.”

Dr. King wasn’t only warning about cruelty. He was naming something subtler: sincerity that feels honest, and conscience that grows numb—not because people lack intelligence, but because they avoid the work required to use it. This isn’t merely about knowing. It’s about becoming the kind of person who refuses to let comfort masquerade as truth—even when the truth costs you something.

An Invitation into Three Kinds of Becoming

If we approach Dr. King with humility, his warning opens into an invitation:

  1. Becoming the kind of person who can learn without self-protection.
  2. Becoming the kind of person who can keep loving while seeking clarity.
  3. Becoming the kind of person who treats truth as a responsibility—not something to be avoided.

So, let’s take Dr. King’s phrase “sincere ignorance” seriously, not as a label to throw at others, but as a mirror—one that helps us notice where we may be missing something, and where we can grow.

Sincere Ignorance: When Not Knowing Feels Like Innocence

Sincere ignorance can happen even with the best intentions. It often begins quietly—with being handed only a portion of the story. We learn in fragments: family traditions, school lessons, community conversations, headlines. When that information is offered as complete, it can feel natural to accept it as reality. Over time, a partial account can solidify into a belief system—not because someone has thought deeply, but because they were never given a reason to question it.

“Ignorance” here doesn’t mean wrongdoing. It often means you simply didn’t have access to the full record—you weren’t trained to doubt yourself in healthy ways, and you weren’t offered the better questions.

And yet—here is the invitation—staying in that ignorance can still carry harm, even without intent.

Sincere ignorance disguises itself as innocence. Confirmation bias works quietly: we notice what aligns with our assumptions and overlook what doesn’t. We confuse “no doubt” with “truth.” In Detroit, I remember how hard it was to make meaning fast enough—how emotions demanded answers, but language didn’t arrive in time. I carried confusion that never became clarity. Dr. King’s phrase invites us to notice that gap: between what we feel, what we assume, and what we know.

Here’s the layer that makes this personal rather than merely intellectual: sometimes sincere ignorance causes harm through kindness. You respond with genuine empathy to someone who needs help—but the facts you’re relying on are trimmed. You’re responding to a portrayal rather than to the full context. Your compassion, guided by incomplete knowledge, may strengthen the very harm you hoped to prevent.

The invitation is not to shame people for what they didn’t know. It’s to learn how to stay compassionate without becoming careless. Becoming intelligent, in this sense, is how we protect love from becoming blind.

Conscientious Stupidity: When We Could Know and Choose Not To

Dr. King’s second phrase carries more weight, because it points to choice. Learning is possible. Clarity is available. Evidence exists. But discomfort protects comfort.

In daily life, this can look like postponing that never ends—asking for proof indefinitely while the pattern stays visible; insisting everything is too complicated until responsibility disappears; debating endlessly while inaction becomes normal.

Conscientious stupidity shifts the emphasis from not knowing to defending not knowing. It can look like demanding receipts while refusing to examine the receipts already within reach—or choosing abstraction over action, talking about nuance while ignoring what harm looks like on the ground.

It often sounds reasonable. It can wear the mask of “I’m just being cautious,” while quietly avoiding the steps that would test the belief.

But I want to keep this an invitation, not a threat. Dr. King isn’t asking, “Are you bad?” He’s asking, “Are you willing to wake up?”

A Spiritual Lens: What Fruit Are You Producing?

Howard Thurman’s approach to scripture offers a grounding question I find spiritually honest: What fruit is this teaching producing? Does it deepen love in action? Or does it produce obedience without transformation?

That question matters here because becoming intelligent is not only cognitive—it’s spiritual. Faith that cannot bear evidence will eventually become a shelter for denial. But faith that can bear evidence becomes a doorway to courage.

The invitation is to let your theology, your spiritual commitments, and your daily habits be tested by fruit. Are you becoming more loving and more accountable? Or more defended and less open?

What “Be Intelligent” Looks Like in Practice

Becoming intelligent isn’t cold or superior. It’s love with clarity.

  1. Pause before repeating a claim. Ask: Where did this come from? What context might be missing?
  2. Seek the full record. Look for credible evidence—not only persuasive stories. If a claim matters, the sources should matter too.
  3. Read teachings by their fruit. Ask: What does this lens train me to do? Compassion with courage, or comfort without accountability?
  4. Turn learning into one next right action. Share what you learn respectfully. Support local justice work. Join conversations that welcome both evidence and humanity.

Don’t Stop at Agreement

If this resonates with you, don’t stop there. Dr. King’s warning is an invitation to become awake—to let truth shape conscience, and to move from confusion to action, so love doesn’t stay trapped in good intentions but becomes something people can feel in the world.

Pick one claim you’ve heard often—something you’ve repeated without fully checking. Don’t choose something to debunk. Choose something to understand responsibly. Research it thoroughly, then name one specific change you will make: how you will speak, what you will support, what you will no longer excuse.

Then invite someone else—gently—into the same work. Not by humiliating them, but by modeling what humility looks like: the courage to say, “I might be missing something,” and the willingness to learn anyway.

Sincerity is not enough. Intelligence, in Dr. King’s sense, is responsibility: the courage to look again, to learn, and to act as though what’s true matters—and as though what happens next matters too.

Dr. King’s warning is not a verdict of you doing something wrong. It is a doorway for truth and love to abound.

Peace and every good.

Numbness, Discernment, and Voting with Care

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Sometimes I am just plain numb.

Not in a dramatic, storybook way—no fireworks, no sudden collapse. It’s quieter than that. It feels like driving through fog for days: my hands still move, my calendar still gets filled, my words still come out in the right order. I can answer emails. I can make dinner. I can show up.

But something inside me turns down the brightness.

It’s as if my heart has decided, If I can’t carry all this, I’ll carry less. Do you know what I mean here? Not because I’ve stopped caring—at least not exactly—but because my body seems to be trying to protect me from the cost of caring all at once, for too long, in a world that never stops asking for attention. EVER!

Numbness doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it disguises itself as competence. Sometimes it sounds like, “It’s fine,” when what I mean is, “I can’t feel the full weight of this moment and still function.”

Then the information comes.

It doesn’t arrive all at once anymore—it arrives like weather. Right? Headlines. Updates. Breaking news. A constant parade of opinions wrapped in certainty, wrapped in urgency, wrapped like they’re personal medicine for whatever I’m currently hungry for. You don’t even have to choose it. It just finds you. It knows what makes you afraid. It knows what makes you feel righteous. It knows what you’re lonely for.

And somehow it keeps stacking until numbness looks less like rest and more like survival.

I used to think numbness was the opposite of hope. Lately I’m wondering if numbness can be a protective shutoff—not because we stopped caring, but because we’ve been overwhelmed with caring for too many things we can’t fix alone.

And that leads me to a question that keeps waking me up at night:

What can we believe? Anything?

Because belief—at least the kind that’s constantly being pushed at us—doesn’t always arrive through reflection. It arrives through pressure. Through targeting. Through personalization. Through a feed that seems to understand my nerves better than I do.

If everything is designed to convince you, then belief itself becomes slippery. I don’t just weigh information; I experience a kind of emotional tug-of-war. I borrow certainty for relief in the moment. I scroll until I find a voice that makes my feelings sound wise. I trade listening for winning. I trade the slow work of discernment for the quick thrill of being right.

Then the next wave arrives.

And I realize the certainty I leaned on wasn’t built to last inside me. It doesn’t grow roots in my values or my conscience. It just briefly covers the exposed parts of me. It soothes discomfort without earning trust. It can feel true because it feels stabilizing—but stability isn’t the same thing as truth.

What I didn’t fully understand until very recently is that the battle isn’t only “what people believe.” The battle is also the environment that trains my mind to adopt beliefs quickly, intensely, and defensively.

And I’ve felt what that training does to me—especially when I start getting stuck around elections.

I keep thinking about how I decide when everything feels like it’s trying to decide for me.

Not just who wins. Not just what side I’m on. But what I can responsibly believe long enough to vote. I was talking with one of my daughters the other day, and she is pretty dog gone smart, we got into this tug of war over voting, who’s right, who’s wrong. Because there are only two choices, correct? I mean we must stand on that statement, right?

Well, voting isn’t theoretical for me. It’s a real choice with real consequences. And I don’t want numbness to steal my discernment while I’m pretending, I’m just “being realistic.”

I’ve noticed a pattern in myself that I don’t like but can’t ignore when information gets relentless, I start chasing certainty. Then I start getting suspicious. Then I start getting overwhelmed. Then numbness shows up again—not calm, not peace, but a kind of emotional dimming so I don’t have to keep bracing.

It’s not that I can’t think. It’s that my thinking gets hijacked by urgency. Can you hear that? Urgency!

So, I’ve been trying to build a decision process that slows down instead of speeding up—one that treats belief like something I cultivate, not something I grab.

Here are a few shifts that have helped me, at least a little:

1) I check my nervous system before I check the headline.

When I’m tense, my brain reads like a courtroom. I look for evidence that will make me feel safe in my conclusion. If I notice my body is on alert, I don’t scroll as much. I pause long enough to ask: Am I trying to find truth—or trying to calm fear? Those are very different tasks.

2) I separate “credible” from “certain.”

A claim can sound confident and still be unreliable. A person can sound convincing and still be careless. When I’m tempted to treat certainty as proof, I try to look for things that last longer than a moment: consistency, willingness to update, clear sourcing, and an ability to hold up under questions.

3) I let my values be a filter, not a shortcut.

Values matter to me—compassion, justice, truth-seeking. But I’ve learned that values can accidentally become permission slips. So instead of asking, “Does this match my values?” I try to ask, “If this policy is applied in the world, who does it help, who does it harm, what tradeoffs are being ignored?”

4) I make decisions in steps, not in panic.

The election cycle tempts me to compress everything into one anxious sprint: gather all info, feel certain, choose immediately, feel morally resolved. But discernment doesn’t work well under time pressure that’s designed by other people. I’ve started asking myself what I can know enough to make the next small responsible decision—and what I need to postpone until I can look again with better clarity.

5) I treat belief like a draft.

If I notice my belief requires me to reject nuance completely—if it demands, I treat disagreement as stupidity or betrayal—that’s a sign. I want convictions that can survive complexity, not convictions that collapse the moment reality gets complicated.

Numbness and discernment both show up as signals, not enemies. Numbness can mean I’m overloaded. It can mean I need boundaries with my attention. It can mean I’ve absorbed too much conflict with no outlet except more information.

But numbness can also become its own trap: a quiet way of opting out. A way of “not feeling” that looks like neutrality while it quietly reshapes what I’m willing to care about.

I don’t want numbness to decide my vote by dulling my conscience. I don’t want exhaustion to turn into apathy dressed as wisdom.

And this is where my concern returns, again and again—back to elections.

I worry about how easily I can be pulled into certainty that doesn’t actually come from evidence. I worry about how easily my mind can be trained to treat emotion as proof. I worry about how the feed can make every issue feel like a personal referendum on whether I’m good, smart, safe, or right.

I worry that the louder the certainty gets, the more I may reach for it simply to stop the feeling of being unmoored.

When I think about voting, I try to come back to a simpler question than “Who is correct?”—a harder question that might protect my integrity:

What would I choose if I weren’t being rushed into belief?

Not what would feel best in the moment. Not what would win the argument. Not what would make me feel righteous fastest. What would I choose if I had time to look carefully, compare responsibly, and accept that I might need to revisit my understanding?

I’m still learning how to do that. I’m still prone to getting tugged into the certainty treadmill, still vulnerable to the fog.

But I’m trying to treat this moment—this election moment—as more than a headline cycle. As a chance to practice discernment instead of numbness. As a chance to believe with care, not with cravings for certainty.

Because at the end of all this, I want my vote to be an act of responsibility, not an act of shutdown. And I want my belief to be sturdy enough to survive contact with reality—especially when reality keeps changing.

Peace and every good!

The Light That Holds Back Darkness 2

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First Comes Justice: The Light That Holds Back the Darkness

This is one story I feel strongly about.

I will not soon forget the first time I walked through the heavy steel doors of a state prison with Kairos Prison Ministries. The Sally port has a clang when it shuts behind you that feels final, like the world I knew had been sealed off, and what lay ahead of me in the eyes of forty plus men whose lives most of society had quietly written off was unknown. And what I did not know when I went in is that you cannot get out of the prison until they let you out, period. And I was dead tired that day. I had convinced myself on the drive over that nothing I said would matter. Surely there were better people, more eloquent people, more useful people for this work. I almost turned around in the parking lot. I never told anyone that feeling until today.

But something made me go in. And in the back row sat a man I will call Marcus (not his name) He had not spoken a word the entire first morning, his arms crossed, his eyes anywhere but on us. No trust, none, by the afternoon, he had shifted. By the second day, he raised his hand, and no one made fun of the question. And on the third day, with tears in his eyes, he told me, “Nobody has visited me in fourteen years. Nobody. Until you.” I cried.

That is when I understood something I had read a hundred times but never felt in my bones. Justice is not a verdict handed down from a bench. Justice is a face in a doorway. Justice is the willingness to walk through the gate when every instinct says RUN the other direction. Justice is showing up, especially for the people the world has decided do not count.

Marcus did not need me to fix his life; in fact, he would have run the other way if I had tried. He needed someone to say, by their presence, that his life still mattered. That is the smallest unit of justice, and it is also the largest. Every policy, every program, every reform is built on that single brick. Just a quick note here for those of you maybe thinking this, No I do not think he needed to be let of prison because we from Kairos came to visit. Some statistics put it this way, 10% are innocent, 80% are doing their time for things they have done, and 10% should never see the light of day.

A Little History for Background

The word justice is older than any nation that claims it. In ancient Hebrew, the concept came in two intertwined words. Mishpat described justice in its sharp, courtroom sense, the kind that punishes wrongdoing and protects the innocent. Tzedakah described justice as right relationship, the kind that restores what has been broken between people. The ancients understood that you cannot have one without the other. Punishment without restoration is cruelty. Restoration without accountability is sentimentality. We learned this in Kairos.

Greek philosophers gave us the idea of justice as a virtue, the fair distribution of what is owed. The Romans codified it into law. The framers of Magna Carta in 1215 forced a king to admit that even he stood under it. Centuries later, abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman risked their lives to insist that justice could not coexist with chains. Suffragists marched for it. Workers organized for it. Dr. King wrote about it from a Birmingham jail, reminding a comfortable nation that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Every generation has had to learn the same lesson the hard way. Justice is not inherited. It is not automatic. It is not the natural state of human affairs. We live with it and it is built, defended, and rebuilt by ordinary people who decide that the world as it is cannot be the world as it should be. Again, Kairos helped me here.

Justice Today, Justice Here

We live, right now, in a moment that tests whether we have learned anything at all.

Roughly two million of our neighbors are behind bars in this country, more than in any other nation on earth. And truly if you added up the next few largest countries together, we still have more in our prisons then they in theirs. Tens of millions go to bed hungry in a land of plenty. Healthcare remains a privilege rather than a right for far too many families. When we had our mission, Everyday People Ministries, we gave out 30 tons of food a month. I saw veterans sleep on sidewalks within sight of the monuments built to honor them. Children grow up in zip codes that determine, with frightening accuracy, what their futures will hold. Like the one I grew up in, in Detroit.

These are not natural disasters. They are choices. Our choices. And choices can be unmade.

The good news is that justice still wears a human face. It looks like the nurse who stays an extra hour with the patient who has no visitors. It looks like the teacher who buys school supplies out of her own paycheck. It looks like the volunteer who delivers a meal, the lawyer who takes a case without payment, the neighbor who pays attention. It looks like Lynette and me sitting at tables in countries far from home, learning that loneliness and hunger speak every language. It looks like a Kairos weekend, where men who have done terrible things and men who have had terrible things done to them sit in the same circle and discover that grace is bigger than any of us deserve.

You do not have to fix the whole system to be part of the answer. You only have to refuse the lie that this is somebody else’s problem. Volunteer for one organization. Mentor one young person. Advocate for one policy. Write one letter. Sit with one person in the hospital. The work is never finished, but the work is never wasted either.

The darkness is loud right now. It tells us we are too small to matter, too tired to try, too divided to agree on anything. It wants us to scroll past, to look away, to whisper “not my problem.” Every time we refuse that whisper, we hold the line. Every time we show up, we push the darkness back by an inch. Inches add up.

Linking Arms

I think often about Marcus, and about the hundreds of others I have met inside those walls. They taught me that I nearly missed the gift by almost “not walking through the gate”. How many gates do the rest of us almost not walk through? How many people are waiting on the other side, not for our money or our expertise or our opinions, but simply for our presence?

We began with a question. What is justice in a world teetering on the edge of chaos? It is fairness, yes. It is accountability, yes. It is law, yes. But underneath all of that, justice is love with its sleeves rolled up. All the way up. It is compassion that has stopped talking and started walking. It is the moment when the comfortable decide that the comfort of the comfortable is not the point.

So here we are, you and I. The need has not gotten smaller since you started reading. Somewhere a child is going to bed afraid tonight. Somewhere a sick person is waiting for someone who will not come. Somewhere a person behind bars is wondering if anyone remembers their name. And somewhere, a gate is waiting for someone to walk through it.

Let us be the ones who walk through. Let us be the ones who link arms across our differences and hold back the darkness together. Let us be known not by what we accumulated or what we argued about, but by who we visited, who we lifted, and who we refused to forget. Let us be the fillers of the breach, the lighters of small candles, the keepers of one another.

The world is not going to save itself. Neither is the person across the street, the person across the country, or the person across the wall. They are waiting on us, and we are waiting on each other, and somewhere in the middle of all that waiting, justice is asking whether we will finally say yes.

First comes justice. Everything else, everything good, everything lasting, everything worth handing down, follows.

Peace and every good.

Sources

  1. Hugh Whelchel, “Understanding Tzedakah & Mishpat (Righteousness & Justice),” Institute for Faith, Work & Economics. https://tifwe.org/tzedakah-mishpat-righteousness-justice/ — for the paired meanings of mishpat(rectifying/retributive justice) and tzedakah (right relationship), and the way the two words function together in the Hebrew Scriptures.
  2. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963. Full text hosted by the University of Pennsylvania African Studies Center: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html — source of the line “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”