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Title:
3 steps to turn everyday get-togethers into transformative gatherings
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Description:
Why do some gatherings take off and others don't? Author Priya Parker shares three easy steps to turn your parties, dinners, meetings and holidays into meaningful, transformative gatherings.
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Speaker:
Priya Parker
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When I was a child,
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every other Friday,
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I would leave my mother
and stepfather's home --
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an Indian and British, atheist, Buddhist,
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agnostic, vegetarian, new age-y sometimes,
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Democratic household.
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And I would go 1.4 miles
to my father and stepmother's home
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and enter a white, Evangelical Christian,
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conservative, Republican,
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twice-a-week-churchgoing,
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meat-eating family.
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It doesn't take a shrink
to explain how I ended up
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in the field of conflict resolution.
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Whether I was facilitating dialogues
in Charlottesville or Istanbul
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or Ahmedabad,
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the challenge was always the same:
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despite all odds,
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and with integrity,
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how do you get people
to connect meaningfully,
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to take risks,
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to be changed by their experience?
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And I would witness extraordinarily
beautiful electricity in those rooms.
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And then I would leave those rooms
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and attend my everyday
gatherings like all of you --
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a wedding or a conference
or a back-to-school picnic --
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and many would fall flat.
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There was a meaning gap
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between these high-intensity
conflict groups
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and my everyday gatherings.
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Now, you could say, sure,
somebody's birthday party
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isn't going to live up to a race dialogue,
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but that's not what I was responding to.
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As a facilitator,
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you're taught to strip everything away
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and focus on the interaction
between people,
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whereas everyday hosts
focus on getting the things right --
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the food, the flowers, the fish knives --
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and leave the interaction
between people largely to chance.
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So I began to wonder how we might change
our everyday gatherings
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to focus on making meaning
by human connection,
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not obsessing with the canapés.
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And I set out and interviewed
dozens of brave and unusual hosts --
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an Olympic hockey coach,
a Cirque du Soleil choreographer,
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a rabbi, a camp counselor--
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to better understand
what creates meaningful
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and even transformative gatherings.
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And I want to share with you
some of what I learned today
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about the new rules of gathering.
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So when most people plan a gathering,
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they start with an off-the-rack format.
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Birthday party? Cake and candles.
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Board meeting?
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One brown table, 12 white men.
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Assuming the purpose is obvious,
we skip too quickly to form.
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This not only leads to dull
and repetitive gatherings,
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it misses a deeper opportunity
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to actually address our needs.
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The first step of creating
more meaningful everyday gatherings
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is to embrace a specific
disputable purpose.
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An expectant mother I know
was dreading her baby shower.
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The idea of "pin the diaper
on the baby" games
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and opening gifts felt odd and irrelevant.
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So she paused to ask:
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What is the purpose of a baby shower?
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What is my need at this moment?
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And she realized it was
to address her fears
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of her and her husband's --
remember that guy? --
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transition to parenthood.
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And so she asked two friends
to invent a gathering based on that.
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And so on a sunny afternoon,
six women gathered.
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And first, to address her fear of labor --
she was terrified --
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they told her stories from her life
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to remind her of the characteristics
she already carries --
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bravery, wonder, faith, surrender --
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that they believed would carry her
and help her in labor as well.
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And as they spoke, they tied a bead
for each quality into a necklace
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that she could wear around her neck
in the delivery room.
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Next, her husband came in,
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and they wrote new vows,
family vows, and spoke them aloud,
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first committing to keep
their marriage central
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as they transitioned to parenthood,
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but also future vows to their future son
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of what they wanted to carry with them
from each of their family lines
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and what would stop with this generation.
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Then more friends came along,
including men, for a dinner party.
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And in lieu of gifts, they each brought
a favorite memory from their childhood
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to share with the table.
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Now, you might be thinking
this is a lot for a baby shower,
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or it's a little weird
or it's a little intimate.
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Good.
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It's specific.
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It's disputable.
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It's specific to them,
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just as your gathering
should be specific to you.
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The next step of creating
more meaningful everyday gatherings
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is to cause good controversy.
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You may have learned, as I did,
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never to talk about sex, politics
or religion at the dinner table.
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It's a good rule in that
it preserves harmony,
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or that's its intention.
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But it strips away a core ingredient
of meaning, which is heat,
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burning relevance.
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The best gatherings learn
to cultivate good controversy
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by creating the conditions for it,
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because human connection
is as threatened by unhealthy peace
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as by unhealthy conflict.
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I was once working
with an architecture firm,
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and they were at a crossroads.
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They had to figure out whether they wanted
to continue to be an architecture firm
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and focus on the construction of buildings
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or pivot and become
the hot new thing, a design firm,
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focusing on beyond
the construction of spaces.
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And there was real
disagreement in the room,
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but you wouldn't know, because no one
was actually speaking up publicly.
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And so we hosted good controversy.
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After a lunch break,
all the architects came back,
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and we hosted a cage match.
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They walked in,
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we took one architect, put him
in one corner to represent architecture,
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the other one to represent design.
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We threw white towels around their necks,
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stolen from the bathroom -- sorry --
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played Rocky music on an iPad,
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got each a Don King-like manager
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to rev them up and prepare them
with counterarguments,
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and then basically made them each argue
the best possible argument
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of each future vision.
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The norm of politeness
was blocking their progress.
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And we then had everybody else
physically choose a side
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in front of their colleagues.
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And because they were able
to actually show where they stood,
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they broke an impasse.
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Architecture won.
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What about a hypothetical
tense Thanksgiving dinner?
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Anyone?
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So first, ask the purpose.
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What does this family need this year?
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If cultivating good heat is part of it,
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then try for a night banning opinions
and asking for stories instead.
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Choose a theme
related to the underlying conflict.
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But instead of opinions,
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ask everybody to share a story
from their life and experience
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that nobody around the table
has ever heard,
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to difference or to belonging
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or to a time I changed my mind,
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giving people a way in to each other
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without burning the house down.
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And finally, to create more meaningful
everyday gatherings,
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create a temporary alternative world
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through the use of pop-up rules.
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A few years ago, I started noticing
invitations coming with a set of rules.
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Kind of boring or controlling, right?
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Wrong.
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In this multicultural,
intersectional society,
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where more of us are gathered and raised
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by people and with etiquette
unlike our own,
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where we don't share the etiquette,
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unspoken norms are trouble,
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whereas pop-up rules allow us
to connect meaningfully.
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They're one-time-only constitutions
for a specific purpose.
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So a team dinner,
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where different generations are gathering
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and don't share the same
assumptions of phone etiquette:
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whoever looks at their phone first
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foots the bill.
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For an entrepreneurial advice circle
of just strangers,
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where the hosts don't want
everybody to just listen
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to the one venture capitalist
in the room --
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you can't reveal what you do for a living.
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where you want to upend the norms
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of what women who also happen
to be mothers talk about when they gather,
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if you talk about your kids,
you have to take a shot.
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because they allow us to temporarily
change and harmonize our behavior.
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And in diverse societies,
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pop-up rules carry special force.
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They allow us to gather across difference,
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to connect,
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to make meaning together
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without having to be the same.
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I navigated my two worlds
by becoming a chameleon.
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If somebody sneezed in my mother's home,
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I would say, "Bless you,"
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in my father's, "God bless you."
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To protect myself, I hid,
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as so many of us do.
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And it wasn't until I grew up
and through conflict work
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that I began to stop hiding.
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And I realized that gatherings for me,
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at their best,
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allow us to be among others,
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to be seen for who we are,
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and to see.
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The way we gather matters
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because how we gather
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is how we live.
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