How We Make Each Other Matter

Weekly wisdom to bring you home in 3 minutes.

A SHORT STORY

I recently came across a story about Winston Churchill’s mother, Lady Randolph Churchill — and I’ve been sitting with it as I talk to people lately.

As the story goes, she dined on consecutive nights with the two legendary British Prime Ministers — William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli.

When asked what each man was like, she said:

“When I left the dining room after sitting next to Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England.

But when I sat next to Disraeli, I left feeling that I was the cleverest woman.”

I’ve always struggled talking about myself, and I genuinely love asking questions of people.

But this story nudged something in me.

Because when I think back to the moments in my life where I’ve left a conversation feeling alive, it’s almost never because someone impressed me with how brilliant they were.

It’s because they made me feel like my inner world was worth exploring.

Like there was something in me that mattered.

A POEM

“Sweetness” by Stephen Dunn

Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving

someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn’t leave a stain,
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet.

Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low

and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief

until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don’t care

where it’s been, or what bitter road
it’s traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.

Grateful,

Michael