Reading and reflecting on Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters a couple of years ago proved to be absolutely transformative in the way I approach training-teaching-learning and more personal interactions. Hers is a book—particularly in Chapter 5, “Never Start a Funeral With Logistics”—that reminds us how often waste the initial moments of many gatherings immersed in inconsequential matters (e.g., where the bathrooms are, where we can park when after the leave the main event and drive over to a reception held nearby, or—one I have repeatedly heard at the beginning of onsite events—what to do in case of a fire or an earthquake) instead of by pulling everyone together literally and figuratively with a scene-setting, compelling story that draws us in as quickly as a cold open pulls us into an engaging television program, movie, or book. Hers is a book that makes us aware of the staggeringly suppressive nature of many of our gatherings—which is a result of our having made them all too brief and easily forgettable because they lack the easy-to-create foundations that would make gatherings memorable, rewarding, and transformative.
After the death of our friend David Moebs many years ago, my wife (Licia) and I realized that one of the greatest losses we felt was the absence of the long, deeply personal gatherings the three of us so frequently had. Going to a movie, a musical performance, or a play was often only the beginning of a gathering; the real action was the conversation we had afterward, over coffee or a full meal, when we relived the movie or concert or play by dissecting and gaining a greater appreciation by talking about what each of us had seen and felt, and how the experience of watching and discussing it together brought us so much more than we would have gained by seeing it alone and then filing it away into one of those rarely-visited filing cabinets of memories that gather dust in our minds. The effect was cumulative: each conversation built upon and added to what we had previously shared; each further created a unique relationship continually fertilized and nurtured by each additional moment we put into that relationship.
This personal version of the art of gathering has been renewed for me at work and play, particularly since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and its accompanying shelter-in-place approach inspired me to become creative about how I seek and nurture those relationships that thrive because of the amount of time and effort my friends and I put into them. In fact, two gatherings that have been nearly set in stone on my schedule for the past few years exemplify the spirit and pleasures of what Parker so enchantingly describes: a weekly virtual dinner and book discussion via Zoom (generally beginning at 4 pm PT on Saturday afternoons and often continuing for at least a few hours) with Licia and our longtime friend Jerry Rehm, who is now retired from his position as manager of the Holocaust Museum bookstore in Washington, D.C.) and a full-day onsite monthly gathering with another long-time friend, Ann Harleman, whose novels and short stories always leave me feeling as if she has opened doors to worlds I might otherwise not have encountered.
There were many years when my relatively brief, immensely pleasurable encounters with Jerry were few and far between. We initially met nearly 30 years ago while attending what was then the annual American Booksellers Association convention (later BookExpo America)—one of those wonderful opportunities when those passionate about books would gather to see what was about to be released by publishers into the hands of booksellers, reviewers, librarians, and others who help connect books and readers. Long after that conference stopped serving as a gathering that drew us together, I would see Jerry and his partner once every few years when professional conferences sponsored by the American Library Association or what was then ASTD (the American Society for Training and Development, later rebranded as ATD, the Association for Talent Development) gave me an excuse to be in Washington, D.C. for several days at a time. Our gatherings, however, grew less and less frequent until a national tragedy—the insurrection in January 2021—reignited the lovely conversations that he, Licia, and I cherished.
It was Licia who took the initial step to reconnect the three of us. Seeing news reports of the insurrection in progress and knowing that Jerry lived fairly close to the Capitol Building, she called to see whether he was safe. And, in Jerry’s inimitable fashion, he quickly assured her he was fine by responding with the words “Yes. I’m under the bed, eating chocolate.”
Their exchange by phone made the three of us realize how much we missed each other’s company. Building upon the pandemic-era successes I was having in staying in touch with friends via Zoom for everything ranging from weekly virtual brunches to highly-interactive learning sessions, we started that second year of the pandemic with a commitment to talk via Zoom every couple of weeks (choosing 7 pm ET/4 pm PT as a good compromise that would allow us to have our dinner together and talk about whatever we had done since our last call). At some point early in that series of calls, Jerry mentioned a book he was reading—Jonathan Sacks’ Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times—and said he wished we were reading it together so we could discuss it. So we did. And then read another. And, at latest count, we’ve read and discussed parts or all of nearly 30 books, with no end in sight, so we’ve in a very satisfying way recaptured that long-lost cherished pattern long, meandering conversations that begin with the reading of a book and make the experience far more deeply rewarding through conversations that explore what the writer accomplished (or failed to accomplish) and how the work we’re exploring connects to and flows into other aspects of our work, lives, and play.
Our monthly Sunday gatherings with Ann have even more fully blossomed in the spirit of the “I am here” days Priya Parker describes in Chapter 4—“Create a Temporary Alternative World”—of The Art of Gathering. Whereas her version of those gatherings grew out of a conversation with her husband during which “we agreed to set aside a full day every now and then for exploring a single unfamiliar neighborhood” and evolved into daylong gatherings with small groups of friends who realized that the length of those gatherings added depth to the conversations and “forced a degree of presence rare in New York and the tech-addled modern world,” ours began as two-hour brunches alternating between Ann’s home and ours on a specific Sunday each month, and have evolved into daylong events where we start over a home-cooked meal at home and then (weather permitting) venture out for long walks where the conversations continue—and never flag. Sometimes it’s about we’ve been doing, including our own writing-in-progress; other times it involves making travel plans together; and, as was the case yesterday when rain kept us from venturing away from the brunch table, we spent a few leisurely hours discussing books we had been recommending back and forth (including Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, James Hollis’s Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up, and Peter Block’s Activating the Common Good: Reclaiming Control of Our Collective Well-Being) and, not surprisingly, circled back briefly to The Art of Gathering in terms of what it suggests and what it continues to inspire in us—which is a deep sense of gratitude for the quality of the gatherings we continue to nurture with those who are important to us.
N.B.: This is the sixteenth in an ongoing series of posts on the theme of giving thanks.