We’ve had snow this season, but yesterday was the first day things were actually canceled. It was a snow day for schools, and when that happens in the district where my work office is located, we’re work from home. I really enjoyed that yesterday.
When I was growing up, snow days unfolded differently. We had to wait and watch the news to find out whether our school district would be closed. You’d tune in and stare at a scrolling list of district names, holding your breath, hoping that yours would finally appear.
In the region where I grew up, the same song always played during that scrolling list: Chuck Mangione’s Bellavia. Every single time.
To this day, whenever I hear that song — and let’s be honest, now I usually have to look it up because it’s not exactly playing on the news anymore — I’m instantly filled with childhood joy. There’s something about it that takes me right back to that feeling of anticipation, possibility, and elation.
Last night, I put it on and danced around my house.
Some memories don’t fade. They just wait patiently for the right moment — like the first snow day.
Once a month, I have the great privilege of co-leading a program called Mindfulness Moments with Andrea Thomas, MA, LLP, a psychologist at Henry Ford Comprehensive Epilepsy Center. What we do together is very simple, yet also surprisingly expansive.
We invite people to arrive on a Zoom screen, something that has become totally routine. And for twenty minutes, Andrea leads us through a mindfulness reflection. We close our eyes, listen, and imagine. Then for ten minutes, I guide us in conversation. Just 30 minutes, once a month.
But when people become present and allow imagination to open, what emerges is often deeply moving.
At our most recent gathering, Andrea invited us to imagine a mountain. It could be one we’ve seen or visited before, or one entirely of our own making.
During the reflection, she asked us to notice everything that changes across a year. Animals move and scatter. Plants grow. Snow falls, then melts. Rocks break off. Fog comes in so thick that sometimes you wouldn’t even know a mountain was there at all.
And yet, the mountain remains. Even when it can’t be seen, it is present.
It is changing all the time, and yet it is also steady, essentially unmoving, save for the tiniest, most imperceptible shifts of tectonic plates over time.
There are moments when people are like that, too.
Sometimes we are hidden. Sometimes we are visible. The core of ourselves is solid and unchanging. And paradoxically, we are also always changing.
When I lived in Pasadena, California, I had a beautiful view of the San Gabriel Mountains. Every so often, fog would settle in so completely that if you didn’t already know the mountains were there, you’d have no idea of their presence. Then the fog would lift, and there they were again. Most of the time, they appeared gray-brown. Occasionally, they were capped with snow.
Unmistakably the same mountains. Always revealing something new.
I find myself returning to that image.
I invite us to consider the parts of ourselves that are hidden, and the parts that are visible. I invite us to connect with the parts that remain steady, and the ways we are being shaped and changed right now.
And I want to leave you with a short poem, written anonymously by a Jewish person during World War II. It was found in the cellar of a concentration camp. It reads:
I believe in the sun, even when it is not shining. I believe in love, even when I can’t feel it. I believe in God, even when He is silent.
Perhaps one of these lines will resonate with us.
Maybe among the parts of us that are hidden or present, or the parts that are unchanging and yet constantly changing.
Here’s an invitation to share that kind word — the one you’ve been sitting on, thinking about, but hesitating to send, or forgetting.
Months ago, all of my coworkers signed a card. We each wrote a short sentence or phrase of encouragement and signed our names. It probably took ten seconds for each one of us.
But it meant the world to the recipient. I happen to know he has carried that card with him for months. It’s become a tangible reminder that we are with him — standing behind him, offering encouragement, and reminding him of his own abundant strength.
Simple words. Small actions. Ordinary forms of recognition.
These acts of kindness go much further than we often realize.
A man looks out on a lake, sitting in an Adirondack chair, with two additional empty chairs on either side. Public domain.
Over the weekend, I had a long drive, and I spent some of that time listening to music I haven’t heard in many years. I’m always amazed by what happens once a song starts. Even if it’s been more than a decade, if that song was part of our lives, the lyrics come rushing back, and we can sing every word.
As someone who used to sing a lot of choral music in different languages, this amazes me every time. Five minutes before a piece begins, I can barely remember anything about it. And then it starts — and suddenly I can sing it word by word, even in languages I don’t actually know. The memory lives somewhere deeper than conscious recall.
Music has a unique way of creating this experience. It bypasses effort. It unlocks something stored in the body.
And it makes me wonder about other things, too.
If we were willing to pause and stay present with our bodies and our senses, what else might we remember? What else might suddenly become present again?
Would we feel connected to people we’ve loved — some who died many years ago, and others we still know and see today? Would we remember what it was like to hear someone say our name in just that particular way? Would the small traits and quirks of people we love come rushing back — things we couldn’t have summoned on purpose?
Or perhaps the remembering would be quieter. A sensation might bring us back to a moment we treasured. Experiencing solitude. Playing as a child. Becoming ourselves without realizing that’s what we were doing.
Music reminds me that so much remains. It’s just waiting for the right kind of attention.
What else might we unlock if we were willing to be present?
While driving in the car, I heard a psychology professor and researcher say a sentence that stopped me short. On the TED Radio Hour, Dr. Jamil Zaki said, “Cynicism is a sort of dark safety.”
He went on to explain:
“When the world is uncertain, we can feel completely exposed — deeply unsafe. So how do you recover a sense of control in a world you fundamentally can’t control? One way is to prejudge it and to prejudge everyone in it. A cynic, by deciding they can’t trust anybody and that people are generally rotten, may not live in a very bright or happy world — but they live in one they understand. They feel as though they can predict the future. They feel as though they understand the people around them, and that gives them some semblance of control over a chaotic life.”
When we believe that most people can’t be trusted, that many—if not most—outcomes will disappoint us, or that not much can truly or meaningfully change,
there is a kind of “certainty” in that.
And navigating uncertainty is hard.
Another psychologist, Dr. Bruce Perry, puts it plainly: “We prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.” [1]
So we stay in familiar, harmful rhythms. We excuse others’ behavior, or our own. We remain where we are, even when we could risk uncertainty and build substantial, life-giving change for ourselves and our communities.
Cynicism may offer dark safety. But it’s also a trap.
[1] Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook—What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us about Loss, Love, and Healing (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
In 2022, I had a chance to perform in a choir alongside the National Arab Orchestra and the renowned Abeer Nehme, whose vocals are absolutely stunning. I highly recommend having a listen to this performance with her.
I know there is so much difficulty unfolding in the world right now. So much that weighs heavy, so much that rightly deserves our attention and care.
But today, I want to share something that’s a little lighter. Something silly. Something that made me smile, and maybe will make you smile too.
Recently, I saw a meme that pointed out how endearingly human it is that when people pass one another on ships or trains, they almost always wave. Big waves. Enthusiastic waves. As if we’ve been waiting our whole lives for this exact moment of mutual acknowledgment.
And honestly, it is pretty cute.
Not long ago, a friend and I were riding e-bikes in a warm climate, enjoying one of those days where your body feels grateful just to be outside. As we cruised along a path, we noticed a small, miniature train coming toward us. It belonged to the city zoo, full of families and kids and people clearly having a day.
So of course, we waved.
And of course, they waved back. Joyfully. Unselfconsciously. The kind of wave that says, Yes, hello fellow humans! Here we all are!
We laughed and kept going, already delighted.
But then, after the train passed, we realized something. The path curved. And the train curved. And unless the laws of physics had suddenly changed, we were going to cross paths again.
When it happened the second time, we just about lost it. There we were again, waving with the same enthusiasm. There were smiles that said, Wait… weren’t they just here?
We kept riding, now with a new thought forming between us.
What if we did this again?
So we sped up a bit. Took a different loop. Timed it just right. And yes, we found them a third time. On purpose.
The looks on people’s faces were priceless. Delight. A collective, unspoken: How are these people here again?
We waved, they waved, and it felt absurd and perfect.
Later, we laughed about it and said, “I guarantee at least five people are going to tell this story when they get home.”
Two hands, brought together to form a shape of a heart. Public domain.
At the end of one of the support groups I lead, we have a small tradition. Everyone brings their hands together and makes the shape of a heart. We do it on Zoom every week, right before we sign off. I don’t even remember how it started, but over time, it’s become part of the rhythm of the group.
Yesterday, we had a new person join us. Toward the end, someone explained it to her gently: “We want this to be a welcoming space, and we hope you’ll come back. We always close like this.” And then I watched seven women, each in her own little Zoom square, lift her hands and cup them together, offering this shared, visual expression of care to one another.
It touched me. Nothing about it is complicated. It’s not scripted or dramatic. It takes just a few seconds. And yet, it communicates so much—you matter, you belong, we’re glad you’re here.
These small, repeated rhythms shape the spaces we’re in. They quietly set a tone. They teach us how to show up for one another. And over time, they change what a group feels like, what it becomes.
Last week, a YouTube influencer went viral after visiting daycares run by Somali immigrant communities in Minnesota and claiming that they were committing fraud. In response, the current administration canceled all childcare payments, not only to the facilities under scrutiny (where fraud has not been legally established), but to childcare programs across five states governed by Democrats.
Many people in this country are one missed paycheck away from serious financial hardship, even homelessness. How do you go to work when your children need care and suddenly have nowhere to go?
And how many times in the past year have entire communities lost resources or been subjected to suspicion and blame because of the alleged actions of one individual, one organization, or one system?
This should be obvious, but it also must be said: Collective punishment is wrong.
Smuggling Grace 