How many people need to be doing their job well in order for you to do your job well?

In Sharon Salzberg’s new book, Real Change, she says that one of her favorite questions to ask is this:

How many people need to be doing their jobs well in order for you to be able to do your job well?

It’s a profound meditation on labor and love. Try it. No, really, right now. Write down all the names of the people who have to show up in order for you to show up. 

For me, right now, it is the sweet family that runs my daughter’s home-based daycare, including Lauren, the OG--as in “original grandmother”--who has the magic power to squish a small child into her generous bosom and make any and all problems go away. It is my mom, who tolerates endless minutes of being spun around on Facetime in nausea-inducing circles while Stella shows her the latest wild animal stuffie she’s rescued from the cave where a bat, the original source of COVID, also dwelled (an ongoing and highly riveting drama in our house). 

It is John, my dude, who fed Maya breakfast (somehow we have devolved around here into serving frozen waffles with sprinkles on top?!) this morning while I ferried Stella to said daycare, and is often with the girls when I am writing these missives. He feeds us endless roasted tomatoes and cleans the bathrooms and even Googled how to fix the garbage disposal this month, and then did it, which I found wildly sexy. He notices all of my missing commas and has learned to tell me about them with the gentlest of tones.   

It is my dear neighbors--Dave, who brings Stella his favorite children’s books and never seems to tire of her erratic attention span and Christine, who slipped Maya a dollar for her bunny fund and has fed us an ungodly number of cupcakes this year.   

It is my friends, my editor, my agent, who keep telling me that this book is useful and, yes hard, but important and that I have the chops and humility to pull it off, even when I am almost 100% sure they’re wrong. It’s so kind of them to keep believing despite all the evidence in my frightened heart.

Stella “editing” my book.

But it is more than that, more than my intimate circle of caregivers--it is all the writers and thinkers whose wake I ride for inspiration and clarity; this week alone: Sharon, and C. Rucker Johnson, and Dirk Tillotson, and Sonya Renee Taylor, and Jesamyn Ward.  

It is the people that made this computer, with its one fried line of pixels on the screen from that time I spilled the whole cup of coffee on top of it while on the Metronorth from somewhere to somewhere, a lifetime ago when I rode trains and inhaled east coast air. The engineers who made the Internet. Who made Substack. Who made Word. The farmers who harvested the coffee beans I am so dependent on--more ritual than chemical. 

It is you, the readers of this newsletter, who send me little notes from your devices, sitting in your backyards and living rooms and bedrooms, places I’ve never been and might never go, but your feedback collapses space and time and we are linked by your generosity and solidarity--I needed this! Keep going! Yes, exactly what I was feeling, but didn’t have the words!

And the point, of course, is that I’m not special. Each one of us does labor that is built on other people’s labor. We work while others care. We care while others work. That’s never been more visible. We get better because other people make us better. We keep going because other people tell us we must, we can, we will. And that labor should be not just acknowledged, but honored, fairly compensated up and down, up and down, up and down the line.

All the layers.

Likewise, our ability to love is not an individual monument to our goodness or skill, but a matter of geologic time. We are sedimentary rock--layers upon layers of love that have been calcified over days and months and years and decades. People have loved us irrationally, unconditionally. And that has allowed us to be here, in this chair, on this couch, in this bed, anywhere at all, doing the work we think we were, maybe, meant to do on this planet, or maybe not at all, maybe just earning a keep, but loved just the same.    

I’ve got a special announcement coming Friday so look out for that. In the meantime, can I recommend filling out these 10Q? You answer 10 questions and then the platform re-sends your answer to you in a year’s time. I’ve been doing it for a few years now and it always blows me away.