3 steps to turn everyday get-togethers into transformative gatherings

When I was a child,

every other Friday,

I would leave my mother
and stepfather's home,

an Indian and British, atheist, Buddhist,

agnostic, vegetarian, new-age-y sometimes,

Democratic household.

And I would go 1.4 miles
to my father and stepmother's home,

and enter a white, Evangelical Christian,

conservative, Republican,

twice-a-week churchgoing,

meat-eating family.

It doesn't take a shrink
to explain how I ended up

in the field of conflict resolution.

(Laughter)

Whether I was facilitating dialogues
in Charlottesville or Istanbul or ??,

the challenge was always the same.

Despite all odds,

and with integrity,

how do you get people
to connect meaningfully,

to take risks,

to be changed by their experience?

And I would witness extraordinarily
beautiful electricity in those rooms,

and then I would leave those rooms

and attend my everyday gatherings

like all of you --

a wedding or a conference
or a back-to-school picnic --

and many would fall flat.

There was a meaning gap

between these high-intensity
conflict groups

and my everyday gatherings.

Now you could say, sure,
somebody's birthday party

isn't going to live up to a race dialogue,

but that's not what I was responding to.

As a facilitator,

you're taught to strip everything away

and focus on the interaction
between people,

whereas everyday hosts
focus on getting the things right --

the food, the flowers, the fish knives,

and leave the interaction
between people largely to chance.

So I began to wonder how we might change
our everyday gatherings

to focus on making meaning

by human connection,

not obsessing with the canapés.