Tracing forward from these remembrances of things past gives us the chance to re-experience and reframe these beliefs. Doing so liberates us from the confounding forces we label as fate, destiny, or—even more frequently—the other person’s “fault.” We will never sort through them all, of course, but what we don’t sort through impedes our happiness. It tricks us into using the rest of our lives—and the people we love, the professions we choose, the organizations we lead—to try to close the gaping wounds from childhood.

Pattern disrupting.

I know I am always whole theoretically, but I don’t always feel that way, I feel half sometimes, I feel fragmented sometimes, messy. Being whole includes owning all of that as me. When I am feeling fragmented or limited, seeing any of my friends in their wholeness reminds me of my own capacity. And as I stand in my wholeness, which includes being more honest with myself and others about what I want and who I am in the world, it exerts a pressure on others, both to receive me and to become more whole in themselves. This disrupts those

familiar diminishing patterns in my friends and in myself, the internalization of a world that has rejected every aspect of my identity at some point. Counter rejection. Still I rise. And new patterns become possible, more interconnected and interdependent patterns that rely on being open.

It’s one of the great ironies of life—and the subject of millions of songs, films, and great works of literature—that the people who make us feel the most alive and who know us best are also the people able to hurt us most. This doesn’t mean that the people who hurt us are malicious, or that we are acting maliciously when we hurt others. Sometimes there is no fault. As we travel on our own unique paths, we can hurt each other without intending

to.

This is the conundrum we find ourselves in as human beings, and how we deal with challenges often defines the course of our lives. Do we face the music? Or do we bury our heads in the sand?

Many difficulties in relationships stem from old habits. We develop automatic, reflexive behaviors over the course of our lives that become so intimately woven into our days that we don’t even see them. In some cases, we become used to avoiding certain feelings and turning away, while in other cases we might be so overcome by emotion that we act on our feelings before we realize it.

By studying some of the most beautiful examples of people whose latent potential popped into view when they came into frame, I became increasingly attuned to seeing and sensing the encodings and fire of those around me.

Then one day, I woke up to realize that my entire emotional state had changed, not just in my work, but across my entire life. Instead of feeling frustrated with what people are not, I’d made a monumental shift to feeling grateful for what they are. I wish I’d made this shift decades earlier but as the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter pointed out, “Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.