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Priya Parker has become the voice of what it means to gather in this world we inhabit now.

She's helping remake the how of coming together, but more importantly, the why.

Long before the pandemic, she points out, we'd fallen into wrote forms for staff meetings,

birthday parties, conferences, shared meals. Virtual or physical, this new time of re-gathering

offers a threshold we can decide to cross with imagination, purpose, and joy. As a

retethering in our lives and families and towards making conflict, generative rather than merely

divisive, this is a conversation with so much to walk away from and put immediately into practice.

I see people in this moment of deep up people where weddings keep getting canceled and book fairs

keep getting canceled and rescheduled and when we don't actually pause and first just kind of

throw our hands up an exasperation and also belly laugh. Right, right. What a mess.

And rather than pretending it's not a mess and being far from the community or people,

whoever those people are, community is actually opening up and saying like, what a mess

and welcome to this mess. And I want to be in this mess with you.

I'm Christa Tippett and this is on being Priya Parker grew up in Virginia and was born

in Zimbabwe of an Indian mother and a Midwestern American father. They divorced when she was young

and for the rest of her childhood as Priya writes in her wonderful book The Art of Gathering.

I moved every two weeks between my mothers and fathers households, toggling back and forth

between a vegetarian, liberal, insens-filled Buddhist Hindu New Age universe and a meat eating

conservative twice a week church-going evangelical Christian realm. So it was perhaps inevitable

...