I never dared to question...

We rise to the occasion meeting our emotions in desolation, desperation, or anger. We fall into the bosoms of laughter, joy, and gratitude elated with no reason beyond a genuine connection we want to explain but cannot.

• Why is the justification necessary?
• Who calls the shots?
• Are our emotions to blame?

— Strangers no more. #recognize

On my shelf this week, I find myself with three books I’m shuffling in between:

• The Secret Struggle, Surviving the suicide of a loved one by Don Ryan.
• In Case of Genocide: Break Glass, How we end genocidal indifference by Richard O’Brien.
• Masters of Change, Why today’s most successful individuals learn to harness life’s most challenging moments to become who they want to be by Julie Brown.

Not a light reading by any stretch. Before I met the papers on these books though, I had the pleasure to get to know their authors a bit whether virtually or in person.

Don came from a family who had lost three members to suicide. I first heard about his story in a group call this week where we were working on building our speaking signature talk.

He gave a short test run and besides wanting to listen to more all I had to give as feedback was to take longer pauses. The staggering statistics and the depth of the tragedy he has witnessed merited the silence for it to be truly understood.

We often miss the need for the space to absorb or allow for the opportunity to create our own connections. We tend to fight back if not given enough room for us to expand into what we are struggling to comprehend.

And yet while silence is necessary it is often scary too for it brings about a depth of comprehension that often we are not ready for. The naked truths feel shameful in a society that deems them so.

Barely four pages in Don shares: “The truth is, I wish I wasn’t the person who wrote this book. I spent the majority of my life after age twenty-one keeping myself overly active, and it became a part of my happy persona. The truth is I was uncomfortable sitting alone. … I start thinking, and that leads me to face hard truths.”

I do not know what stories thoughts brought to bear for Don. What whys came unraveling in the void the losses have created. Yet what I know is whom I met in the aftermath of it all.

A kind man crafted by the vulnerability of someone who sought to keep to himself unraveling into a soul you could connect with in mere seconds with no “why” needed to justify it.

— Positioning. #understand

Richard on the other hand, I only met last night. I am barely a few pages into his book and could already see he is a master storyteller. Not that I was surprised because I had witnessed it firsthand over dinner as hours flew by connecting us instantly and unexpectedly.

In 2000 Richard founded the Center for the Prevention of Genocide, an early warning, human rights NGO designed to predict, intercept, and intervene in the most deadly of genocide activities.

Across the street from where the center used to be, we enjoyed a burger at a local dive bar he frequently closed the night at. We exchanged stories about Byblos in Lebanon where he had spent three months, possible collaboration, and what ambitions we both hold for the future.

As we spoke about bringing about change not on a small scale but more so on a global and national one, we teased out the woes of identity and the drama that unfolds in its wake. How history has made sure that in the isolation of a tribe extremely defined we lose our means to connect and consequently resolve in brutality.

I have yet to discover the solution he has for genocide but what I could glean in the spirit of the conversation that we had is that atrocities happen way before they are committed. When we recognize who called the shot eventually it’s probably too late.

— Colombia. #accept

For her, it was Columbia and for me these days it is many places. I used to need to be somewhere to feel something. We seek connections shaped by the struggle we portray in constructs such as identity that we often fail to recognize their frailty and end up zealots in their call for arms.

In the breadth of the interviews she has done, you can find many examples of the catalysts that drive about our change whether forcefully or other.

Yet in this journey, I keep unraveling, connection is all that there is. We cannot meet it without emotions in all their breadth and no matter the story they assume when it’s true it cuts through it all.

There was once a time when I would look at the day and wait for it to end. Time would pass by not by mere seconds but eons. Witnessing it, elongated the duration and suddenly I became a prisoner within its purview.

Too shy to ask, I never dared to question the loneliness it threw me in. And thus I caved under its mercy and relinquished my right to intervene. When was the last time you took it upon yourself to witness when the question stopped being asked?

Because it is then that we lose the connection. We lose our right to belong without needing a structure to hold us against that truth. Treat emotions with no more bearing than their reaction to a world trying to justify itself missing that no matter “why” every cause is an assumption portraying reality not truly being it.

I continue to ruffle through the pages jumping in between meeting new eyes that have witnessed pain yet have a proclivity for hope like no other. With Don’s words, I leave you: “But life is what it is, and recognizing this, I have become the person who wrote it.”

Until next time,
Carlo