The Invitation by Oriah

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, ‘Yes.’

It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

What can and will be

My wife, Shonali, is insane with dates.

If she meets you and you mention your birth date or anniversary to her, she will comfortably remember it 10 years later. Shonali and I celebrate not only the anniversary of our engagement AND the anniversary of our wedding but ALSO the anniversary of the first time that we met and I’ve always attributed this tradition to Shonali being insane with dates.

“Remember dates, will celebrate.”

But I was reflecting on our tradition of celebrating the first time that we met and I think its importance transcends the weird wiring of my wife’s brain.

When you meet someone important for the first time, that moment of first meeting is filled with unlimited possibility. In that moment, your relationship is unfettered by any past or present history and entirely comprised of what-can-and-will-be.

We should all be so lucky as to travel long roads together… that are marked by recurring renewal of possibility.

Happy anniversary Shonali.

Shaming myself into writing more

OK, I’m going to try to shame myself into writing more by… writing about what I should be writing about.

I should be writing about… how we’re thinking about our office space at SnapStream. In a nut shell, we’re going to “unbundle” our current office at 601 Sawyer– get a separate space for the shipping/receiving and critical infrastructure equipment — and then go “no office” come February and then wait until there line of sight on a widely available vaccine. And then we’ll start making plans for an office that serves our completely new set of needs. Oh and we’ll definitely be upgrading our landlord along the way.

I should be writing about… how we’ve embraced working from home at SnapStream to re-shape how we run the company, trying to write things down more (and our embrace of Notion for internal knowledge sharing), trying to make more decisions asynchronously, the journey from lots of zoom meetings to a mix of zoom meetings and phone calls.

I should be writing about… what I’ve learned on our journey at SnapStream as we’ve been rebooting the company in the last 5 years to set ourselves up to have more impact and grow faster, especially everything we’ve done in the last one year. Which reminds me of this tweet:

How do I solve this, “I don’t write and share publicly enough” problem? What’s missing? A writing coach? A platform (so what I write gets in front of a larger audience)? A community of other wannabe writers (I know the “I want to write/blog more” is a common desire amongst a bunch of my friends)?