Take Note, Take Action, Make Art, Touch a Heart
Four ways to help make even the hardest of days more human
As I write, this week’s headlines are addressing the reaction to both the recent federal attacks on freedom of the press and the ICE killings in Houston and Maine. Historian Heather Cox Richardson, in an interview this month with Zeteo’s John Harwood, says, “We’re on a knife’s edge between rising authoritarianism and the rebirth of American democracy, and the question is: which one of us is going to cross the finish line first?”
At the same time, we’re all here trying to figure out how to lead our lives and lead our organizations through these more-challenging-than-we-might-ever-have-expected-even-two-years-ago times. The good news, poet Mark Nepo reminds me, is that “the difficulty of any moment is only half the reality”—the same knife’s edge that could, in some cases, cause severe harm could also be used to help cook a world-class supper. When I feel frustrated or down, I remind myself of Nepo’s insight. No matter how dark any given day might appear to be, no matter how poor any given profit and loss statement can look, no matter what crisis may come our way, there is always, always more to the story.
Context—and constructive input like Mark Nepo’s—most definitely helps me to stay positive and hopeful! Even when we feel really stuck, it’s good to remember that if we sit with that frustration a bit, read a little, write a little, check in with friends, jot down a poem, or perhaps go for a run, there will almost certainly be parts of the picture we hadn’t yet seen. After all, none of us has all the answers. As Nepo puts it, “We’re all just here comparing notes”—trying to be true to ourselves, live our values, and make a positive difference in the world in the process, all while staying true to who we really are. Most of us, I believe, want to figure out how to be human in the best possible way.
In the interest of making that happen, one morning last week I decided to subscribe to the monthly newsletter of the Ukrainian news site Chytomo. Intriguingly subtitled “The culture of reading and the art of book publishing,” it covers all kinds of creative topics that are close to my heart. After filling in the requisite info, I found myself taken to a second, bot-blocking web page that directed me to “Confirm Humanity.” I couldn’t help but smile as soon as I saw the instructions, and I’m smiling now as I share the story here. I quickly checked the box, letting the folks keeping track in Kyiv know that I was indeed eminently, imperfectly human.
What follows is, in a sense, about ways to make that humanity come alive. While doing so clearly takes more than just clicking a box, when it comes down to it, there are any number of creative approaches through which we might effectively exhibit our full humanity. In a 21st-century era that appears to be centered instead on dehumanizing, soul-diminishing drama and fast-scrolling social media, we seem stuck in a struggle between the belief that “nothing matters” (someone I know and like told me directly the other day, “I don’t believe in anything anymore!”) and the fantasy that some sort of “elusive savior” of an autocratic leader is going to swoop in and rescue us from reality.
As you likely know by now, I’m headed determinedly in the opposite direction. I believe as strongly and deeply as ever that:
a) Everything matters! Seemingly small things are still hugely significant.
b) Everyone matters! From university professors to the unemployed, from line cooks to business leaders, everybody, of every age and every background, matters.
c) No one is going to save us! Whatever needs to be done, it’s up to us to do it.
Living true to these three beliefs every day is, of course, easier said than done. Author Anne Applebaum, writing in The Atlantic, talks about the all-too-common tendency that takes place when people are confronted—in both companies and countries—with the impending (and/or already present) imposition of authoritarian rule. Instead of living out the title of Bob Marley’s classic tune “Get Up, Stand Up,” Applebaum observes, many folks do the exact opposite. They sit down, stand back, and steer clear, or, in some cases, they sign up, simply swearing loyalty to authoritarian leaders. Describing one present-day politician, she says, “Like many other people who have lived under political occupation or experienced radical regime change—he made the decision to abandon his previous ideals.”
Certainly, as humans, we’re going to slip at times; even the best intentions are implemented, at most, imperfectly. Sometimes, to be sure, the world can wear down even the most resilient of us. We all struggle; we all succeed; we all fall down; then we get up off the ground—both real and metaphorical—and get moving again.
So what does one do when it feels especially hard to stay true to our humanity, when things seem stuck at a standstill, when many people appear to be abandoning their values in the interest of expedience, when the drama and the difficulties imposed from the outside—even when they’re imposed on others and not directly on us—feel particularly challenging?
The same “bookazine” from The Kyiv Independent that I wrote a lot about last week—The Power Within—tells the story of a tall, gray-haired man in his 50s named Volodomyr. He has, the article relates, been actively engaged in the Ukrainian war effort, fighting the full-scale Russian invasion since it began at the end of February 2022. It would certainly seem from the outside that he has good reason to feel worn down, to want to opt out, to retreat emotionally. Yet he determinedly won’t back down: “People are obviously tired,” he says. “I understand. But aren’t we [all] tired?” Reassuring everyone who will listen, he adds, “Don’t worry, it’ll all be okay. … We can’t lose heart.” Even all the way on this side of the Atlantic, more than 5,000 miles away from the frontline fighting, Volodomyr’s comments very much boosted my spirits!
Here in the U.S., we’re fortunate not to be fighting in a physical war—we don’t have to literally risk life and limb, as Ukrainians have been doing for so many years. Most of us read about war, then go to work. Still, the state of the world—more specifically, our world here in the U.S. in its current form—can be wearing. And not everyone succeeds in staying on course when we’re confronted with autocratic activity. As you likely are aware, though, I don’t give up easily. I’m determined to lean in, not lay back—to learn and grow and make a meaningful difference in whatever small ways I can that might matter. I’ll throw in my emotional lot with British poet Alfred Tennyson, who once wrote that though we may have been “made weak by time and fate,” we are still “strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
With Tennyson’s masterful work in mind, and in an in-the-moment effort to stay on track, I framed an approach for myself the other afternoon in the form of a poem. Or maybe it’s a poetically oriented framework. Someone once said of Keith Richards’s guitar work with the Rolling Stones that he demonstrated regularly that “the right riff, played with the right groove, can define an entire song.” I’ll extrapolate here to say that the right poem, with persistent implementation, might just be able to define an entire life. In any case, here it is. It’s been helping me some, and I hope it helps you, too! Better still, sit down for a few minutes and, per the third point below, write a poem of your own.
Take note
Take action
Make art
Touch a heart
Work done in any of these four areas will help—help the heart of the doer, help those who are the recipients of the work, help our organizations, and help the world around us all at once! Take your pick from the list, or take them all on. I’d love to know what you learn.
Take Note
This first point is a lot about paying better attention—in the belief that, if and when we look, we will find beauty all around us, all the time. It’s about training our eyes, our hearts, and our minds to see what is already there to be seen and appreciated. It’s a skill we can develop every day—not something we’re somehow magically born with—and one I’ll be working to improve at, I’m sure, for the rest of my life.
As Irish philosopher John O’Donohue observes,
If your style of looking becomes beautiful, then beauty will become visible and shine forth for us. We will be surprised to discover beauty in unexpected places where the ungraceful eye would never linger. The graced eye can glimpse beauty anywhere, for beauty does not reserve itself for special elite moments or instances; it does not wait for perfection but is present already secretly in everything. When we beautify our gaze, the grace of hidden beauty becomes our joy and our sanctuary.
Mateo Kehler is a man whose eye, through long and diligent daily practice, surely seems graced. At the American Cheese Society’s Annual Conference in Louisville last week, I found myself chatting with Mateo, one of the founders of the renowned Jasper Hill Farm, located in what’s known as the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. The next evening, it turned out, Jasper Hill won the Best of Show award at the conference, out of many hundreds of entries, for its Winnimere cheese. Backing up, though: he and I were talking, as many of the folks I know tend to do these days, about how we handle the challenging nature of the news.
Mateo smiled and reminded me of what he’d written in a small pamphlet he’d shared at last year’s ACS show to help folks with this same struggle. When he feels down, Mateo told me, he takes a few minutes each morning to “recognize the miracle that a sunrise represents and the opportunity for deep humaning that comes every morning.” Mateo makes a good point, one that’s well aligned with the Chytomo website’s desire for us to “confirm” our humanity. Finding ways to appreciate the beauty—to remind ourselves how many wonderful things are out there in the world, no matter how grim the headlines may seem—works wonders. It’s one reason that reading is, as I wrote last week, such a meaningful act of resistance.
Speaking of reading, resistance, and finding joy in small, everyday things, I had the pleasure of watching a 10-year-old walk to his table at the Roadhouse with his father the other evening, reading intently the entire time! I asked his dad later what had caught his son’s attention. “He loves history,” he said. “The book is about Korean War heroes!” In an era when the common wisdom is that “no one reads,” that little connection with a cool local kid made my day. Recognizing the power of this seemingly small stuff actually adds enormously to one’s energy. (It’s also good business—I got to recommend Ji Hye’s traditional Korean cooking at Miss Kim, which they hadn’t yet heard of!)
Take Action
Small actions can, and do, make a big difference. As the artist Vincent Van Gogh once wisely observed, “Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” It’s true of our lives, it’s certainly true of business, and it’s even truer still in the world at large. People love to leer at big headlines, watch athletes win medals, and see movie stars win awards, but I’ve learned over and over again that it’s nearly always the small, below-the-radar bits of good work that really add up to make change.
Here’s one inspiring example. This past Sunday, I had coffee with my friend Teddy Araya. Teddy and I met maybe 10 or 12 years ago or so, when I went to Ethiopia to speak for ZingTrain (yes, ZingTrain does indeed do work overseas!). Around that same time, Teddy founded the Center for African Leadership Studies.
Sunday morning, over cups of that very tasty Tanzanian coffee I wrote a bunch about last week, Teddy shared a story about a fellow Ethiopian who resides here in the States. When Teddy met him, the fellow had recently returned home to Ethiopia to care for his ailing father. After arriving in Addis Ababa, the man had gone directly to the hospital to look after his dad. He stayed in Addis, attending to his father, for about four weeks. When his dad’s health began to improve, he flew back to the States, where he lives and works, to pick up with life where he’d left off.
Not long after, though, the situation reversed: his father’s health again took a turn for the worse, so, being the loving and loyal son that he is, this fellow got right back on a plane and flew home to Addis once again. This time he stayed about three weeks to care for his father, who, again, began to improve, at which point the man made the decision to return to the States to resume his life.
Unfortunately, upon returning, he learned that he’d lost his job due to excessive absence. To make things far worse, soon after getting back to the U.S.—where he unexpectedly found himself unemployed—he learned that his father had just died in Ethiopia. He diligently boarded a plane to Addis to bury his dad. Which is when he met Teddy.
This man’s struggle, Teddy shared with me, is hardly unique:
An estimated two to three million Ethiopians live abroad, and nearly all of them carry the same quiet worry: who is taking care of my parents, and will I make it home in time if something goes wrong? … [Here in the States], stricter U.S. visa requirements and the new financial deposit tied to U.S. entry are making it harder and more expensive to fly home for a family emergency, or to bring a parent abroad for treatment.
Had Teddy even just listened to this man’s story, that alone would have been an act of generosity and kindness. But he went much further. Struck by the tragic nature of the situation, he took action and created a nonprofit that he came to call Health Gifts.
Knowing that there are thousands of doctors and nurses out of work in Ethiopia, Teddy set about raising money so that when Ethiopians living in the States find out about a relative who is sick, they can reach out to this program; Teddy and crew then connect them with a doctor and/or nurse in Ethiopia who can begin caring for their relatives. The program allows for consistent care, regular conversation, and a high level of security and confidence, without anyone having to fly back and forth across the Atlantic. It also helps trained Ethiopian doctors and nurses earn income in the field they prepared for. Rather than finding themselves shining shoes, tending bar, or driving pedicabs to make enough money to live on, they can practice the profession they are so passionate about.
In the spirit of poet Mark Nepo’s quote up top, Teddy has effectively written the “other half of the story.” He used the metaphorical knife’s edge to cut through the typical bureaucratic status quo, creating instead a program in which all involved come out ahead. What began with sadness and despair has now developed into life-changing work. (In a few weeks, I’ll have the link through which we can make donations to Health Gifts.)
The effort to do something—small though it may seem—to help support democracy is what led me, too, to create the Apricots for Dignity and Democracy work. The backstory on the project is here. If you’re in Ann Arbor, we have the apricot pins, designed by Agavny Vardanian, for sale at the Roadhouse host stand, and all the proceeds go to Democracy Now!. Or if you’re shopping online, here’s Agavny’s Etsy store.
Ready to take action of your own? Let me know what you come up with!
Make Art
Art, I have learned over the years, is an awesome way to both lift our own spirits and make a positive impact on those around us. The pamphlet “The Art of Business” marked my realization that, if we were to lead our organizations and/or live every day in the belief that our lives and our work are art, or poetry, or music, we would pay way more attention to every small action we take. Beauty would, without question, be more likely to abound, and the world would be a more positive place to be a part of. As Mark Nepo noted earlier this year, “We are asked to hold our individual lives as a work of art that inhabiting fully will bring into being.”
Of course, art doesn’t always mean “easy.” In the same Kyiv Independent “bookazine” that I mentioned above, The Power Within, there’s an article by the newspaper’s cofounder, Darya Shulzhenko, entitled “Yaryna Chornohuz, the brave poet fighting Russia.” It’s about a remarkable young Ukrainian woman named Yaryna Chornohuz who just celebrated her 30th birthday two months back, in the middle of May. In a sense, Chornohuz’s life and work sum up everything I’ve written about in this essay—and then some. She is, at the same time, a soldier in the Ukrainian army, a widow (her significant other was killed by the Russians while fighting on the front), a medic, a mother, an activist for women’s rights, an author, and a poet who, as the article says, works at “weaving the beauty of the Ukrainian language into captivating verses.”
Poetry, Chornohuz says, helps her “to remain human” through the horror of war. She writes in one of her poems, “In every woman, there is a soldier, destined to face the darkness alone.” As I have been learning in the study of poetry and the development of a “poetic approach to leadership,” poetry cracks open emotional doors and allows us to crystallize our thoughts and focus our feelings in ways that might well do the same for others. Try reading any poem (better still, read one you wrote) out loud at the start of the next meeting you lead, and I’ll bet you dollars to Roadhouse doughnuts that you will, in the process, alter the dynamic of the whole gathering, almost certainly for the better.
As Chornohuz explains,
When you are writing a poem you do this act of trust. It’s very frank and philosophical and truthful. And the listener is the one who trusts. And trust is everything when you have war. … Culture is something that shows that human fragility is actually a power. It is in the “basement” of everything. It is the language of our identity. You don’t have to fear understanding yourself. If you have no culture, you risk not understanding yourself.
(If you want to practice, snag one of the remaining seats for nationally recognized poet Michael Dickman’s hands-on, pens-on-paper poetry workshop at the Roadhouse later this month.)
Chornohuz may be young, but she’s determined to stick with her work for the duration. And she has the solid sense of history—a sense that is increasingly absent here in the U.S.—to ground herself for the long haul:
If you look at the history of [Cossack leader] Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the Cossacks, and the Ruin, it goes back at least to the 17th century. This empire changed its names: it was the Russian Empire, then it was the Soviet Union, now it is the Russian Federation, but in all centuries they did the same thing. We didn’t defeat them in the 17th century; they inflicted three famines on us in the 20th. And now they use the tactic of scorched earth: they simply level cities to the ground, along with people. With all this in mind, the fact that we continue to fight against them is actually our incredible success, and we need to continue it. I believe that we will be able to successfully defend ourselves for many, many more years, and perhaps we will break them and change this several-hundred-year tradition, inspired by what we have now. But it is already costing us the lives and health of the best of us. It is costing us the incredible efforts of spirit and endurance that are made every day on the front line.
Prasad Bidaye, a professor at Humber Polytechnic north of here in Ontario and an integral element of the great work of Indigenous Resistance, wrote on Substack that his “comparative literature professor, the late [Czech literary theorist] Lubomír Doležel, used to stress in his lectures, the purpose of literary fiction is to imagine possible worlds, worlds that might not exist in actuality—in history—but could exist in fiction, if not reality. For readers, the more possible worlds, the better.” I would add to Doležel’s framing only that I don’t believe that work is limited to literary fiction. Nonfiction, philosophy, food writing, painting, poetry, et cetera can all make that happen, too. Our charge, then, is to find ways to make art that lights you up, art that demonstrates the diversity of possible worlds we might all work to create, worlds that we also aspire to be a part of.
Before you defer by denying that you’re any kind of artist, I’ll offer the wise words of writer George Saunders, who reminds us,
That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality … is as bright and shining as any that has ever been. … Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.
Touch a Heart
British philosopher Iain McGilchrist says, “We can choose to dispose of our attention in a certain way, and depending on how we dispose of it, we find a different world.” When we believe what we do matters, the door is open for us to touch a wide range of hearts in modest but meaningful ways.
I’ve had the honor of watching from the sidelines as my significant other, Tammie Gilfoyle, touches dozens of hearts in the spin class she attends at the local gym. In a seemingly innocuous setting, through one small, lovingly beautiful step after another, she is touching hearts, lighting up people’s eyes, and lightening their loads in life. None of what she’s doing is big-budget stuff—it’s a handwritten card here, a special birthday cake there, a bouquet of flowers and a smile brought to brighten an early Saturday morning class this past spring. Mark Nepo says, “Care is to the soul what wood is to the fire,” which means that Tammie is metaphorically feeding the flames in her friends’ hearts in the best possible way.
Here in the ZCoB (Zingerman’s Community of Businesses), we all have the chance to touch hearts every day. It’s at the core of what we call “Great Service,” and of making our mission come alive by bringing amazing Zingerman’s Experiences to everyone we interact with: tiny acts to help a guest who’s ill, to welcome a first-time customer from far away who’s feeling anxious, to send someone home with the gift of their favorite pastry.
Is it always easy? No. I remind myself, though, of the Zen saying, “Obstacles do not block the path. They are the path.” In this context, touching hearts can be done systemically—which is why, this month, we’re taking nominations for our Service Hall of Fame. It’s hardly some hugely innovative idea, but you know what? It works! Throughout the month of July, any of us can nominate any of our colleagues. And at the end of the month, the Great Service Group sends out the various nominations so that those who’ve been nominated can read the kind words their colleagues wrote about them. Typically, tears ensue. The cost? Pretty much nothing!
In the spirit of Mark Nepo’s quote up top, in a spring 2023 interview for Chytomo, Yaryna Chornohuz shares,
When I lost a close person in the war, I told myself that I wanted this loss and the memory of this person to make me stronger, not drag me down. I repeated this to myself many times, but I didn’t always succeed. For some time it really hurt more, but then there came a period when this memory began to give me strength. Because this is the nature of loss. At first, it hurts, and then it becomes a “life for two”: for yourself and for the one who is gone. I hope that the same will happen to the whole society. In the beginning, it will be very difficult and painful for us, but then the memory of those who are gone will finally allow us to do what we have not done for 30 years of stagnation. Finally, we will change and realize what we have to do every day to prevent such a tragedy from happening to us again.
This last line, I believe, applies to all of us. We will change and realize what we can do to prevent the kinds of tragedies that threaten to get in the way of living our humanness to its fullest potential.
Again, action taken in any of the four areas of activity above will be a positive contribution to our lives and our work. And, if I can encourage you, don’t delay—as I’ve heard Mark Nepo say in something like half a hundred interviews, “Life is always where we are.”
