Dear Reader,
I know I’ve been away for a little while.
Life has a way of asking us to be present in places other than the ones where people can see us. And sometimes, stepping away from the noise gives us an opportunity to listen a little more carefully, observe a little more closely, and decide what is actually worth saying when we return.
For me, some of that time away has been deeply personal.
I am still learning how to live alongside the grief of losing my mother.
I say alongside because I am beginning to understand that grief is not something we simply move through and leave behind. It changes shape. It changes volume. Some days it sits quietly beside you. Other days it walks directly into the room and demands your attention.
Grief has its own timetable, its own language, and its own way of rearranging what feels important.
And I am learning that it rearranges people, too.
Or perhaps more accurately, it rearranges our understanding of them.
That has been one of the more difficult lessons of this season.
Today felt like a good day to come back.
I recently rediscovered an image from something I shared years ago. In it, a young person asks a wise man where they might build a great career.
His answer?
“Be a good human being. There is a lot of opportunity in this area and very little competition.”
I cannot verify who originally said those words, so I will not pretend to know their source.
But the message?
That one is worth sitting with.
And perhaps I am sitting with it differently now than I would have a year ago.
Because grief has a way of taking ideas we thought we understood and giving them weight.
“Be a good human” sounds simple when life is ordinary.
It sounds different when someone dies.
It sounds different when you are hurting and someone you have not heard from since childhood finds a way to reach you.
It sounds different when a person you were certain would show up does not.
It sounds different when you discover that presence is not always determined by proximity, and closeness is not always measured by how recently you spoke.
Somewhere in this season, that little sentence stopped feeling like an inspirational quote to me.
It became a question:
What does being a good human actually look like when another human being is hurting?
Not when there is something to gain.
Not when someone is watching.
Not when the gesture is convenient.
But when another person is living through something you cannot fix.
I have been learning a great deal about that.
Grief has taught me a great deal about presence.
When something devastating happens, you begin to notice people differently.
You notice the people who call.
The people who send a message.
The people who remember a date you wish you could forget.
The people who check again after everyone else has gone back to their regular lives.
The people who sit beside you without trying to fix anything.
The people who understand that “How are you?” may have a very complicated answer.
And sometimes, you are surprised by who shows up.
In my case, I was more than surprised.
I was astonished.
My heart was full because some of the people who reached toward me were people I had not seen since childhood. People I had not spoken with in years. People whose names belonged to another chapter of my life, and yet somehow, when they heard that my mother had died, they came back into the room.
A message.
A phone call.
A memory.
A condolence.
A few simple words that said, in one form or another:
I heard. I remember. I care.
There was something riveting about that for me.
Perhaps because grief has a strange way of collapsing time.
Suddenly, a person you have not seen since you were young is no longer distant. For a moment, all those years disappear, and there you are again, connected by history, memory, family, neighborhood, school, childhood, or simply by the recognition that another human being is hurting.
And those moments reminded me that relationships do not always behave according to the categories we assign them.
“Close friend.”
“Old friend.”
“Former colleague.”
“Someone I grew up with.”
“Someone I haven’t spoken to in years.”
Life has a way of challenging those labels.
Sometimes the person you barely expected to hear from offers exactly the kindness you needed.
And sometimes the person you assumed would be standing beside you is nowhere to be found.
That one hurts differently.
There have been people in my life whom I genuinely believed would acknowledge the death of my mother.
Some have not.
No condolence.
No message.
No quiet acknowledgment that something profound had happened.
And enough time has passed that I can no longer comfortably tell myself that every absence was simply an oversight.
That realization has made me sad.
Not angry.
Sad.
Because grief is already asking you to understand a world in which someone you deeply love is no longer physically present. It is an especially difficult time to discover that some relationships may not have held the meaning you believed they did.
At the same time, I cannot tell this story honestly without also honoring the people who surprised me in the other direction.
The people who appeared from years ago.
The people who remembered.
The people who reached across time and distance simply because they knew my heart had been broken.
They taught me something, too.
Presence is not always determined by proximity.
And closeness is not always measured by how recently we spoke.
Sometimes humanity simply recognizes humanity.
Because being a good human is not always some grand act of service.
Sometimes it is remembering.
Sometimes it is reaching out.
Sometimes it is noticing that someone has disappeared from the usual rhythm of life and wondering why.
Sometimes it is sending the message even though you are not sure what to say.
Sometimes it is deciding that imperfect words are better than silence.
And sometimes it is showing another person, unexpectedly and beautifully, that the years between you did not erase the humanity that once connected you.
I have had to sit with all of this.
And I am still sitting with it.
I am learning not to immediately assign motives to people. Human beings are complicated. Some people are uncomfortable with death. Some do not know what to say. Some freeze around grief. Some have private circumstances we know nothing about.
Grace requires room for those possibilities.
But grace does not require us to ignore patterns.
That has been another lesson.
Compassion and discernment can coexist.
I can understand that someone may have had reasons for not showing up and still allow their absence to teach me something about the relationship.
I can love people and reevaluate their proximity to my life.
I can forgive without pretending something did not matter.
I can extend grace without abandoning my own expectations of reciprocity, care, and humanity.
Perhaps that is one of the harder parts of adulthood:
Learning that not every relationship needs a dramatic ending.
Sometimes it simply needs a more accurate definition.
There are people I may continue to care for whom I now understand differently.
That does not require resentment.
It requires clarity.
And perhaps that clarity is one of grief’s quieter gifts.
It reveals priorities.
It reveals relationships.
It reveals values.
It reveals who knows how to enter another person’s pain without making it about themselves.
And it reveals something else:
People value different things.
We say that casually, but living it can be sobering.
What we value eventually makes itself visible.
In what we protect.
In what we prioritize.
In what we remember.
In what we ignore.
In who we call.
In who we make room for.
In who receives our attention when there is nothing immediate in it for us.
And maybe this is where my personal life and my professional work have been colliding for me.
Because I spend much of my life thinking about leadership, and I have come to believe that the same principle applies there.
What we value eventually makes itself visible.
In how we speak to people.
In how we wield authority.
In whether we create fear or trust.
In whether we challenge people while preserving their dignity.
In whether the people around us feel used for their performance or valued for their humanity.
We have inherited leadership traditions that sometimes confuse hardness with strength, intimidation with accountability, and domination with authority.
But longevity does not make something wisdom.
People do not need to be diminished in order to be developed.
They do not need to be frightened in order to be accountable.
High standards and humane leadership are not opposing ideas.
Leadership is profoundly human work.
And character is not a soft skill.
It is infrastructure.
I often remind leaders that people may not remember every strategic decision you made, every presentation you delivered, or every metric you exceeded.
But they will remember what it felt like to work with you.
Did you listen?
Did you see them?
Did you make it safe to tell the truth?
Did you challenge them without diminishing them?
Did you keep your word?
Did your leadership leave them stronger?
And perhaps we should ask similar questions of ourselves outside the workplace.
Did I show up?
Did I notice?
Did I make room for another person’s humanity?
Did I reach out when there was nothing I could fix?
Did I offer presence when words were inadequate?
Did the people I say matter to me experience that importance through my actions?
Those questions matter because leadership does not simply produce results.
Leadership produces experiences.
And those experiences become culture.
Relationships produce experiences, too.
And those experiences become trust.
Or distance.
Sometimes both.
So perhaps the most important development question we can ask ourselves from time to time is not:
How do I become more successful?
Maybe it is:
Who am I becoming as I pursue success?
Am I becoming more generous?
More courageous?
More discerning?
More accountable?
More compassionate?
More willing to listen?
More capable of holding both conviction and humility?
More present?
More human?
Because there are plenty of opportunities to build a career.
There are plenty of opportunities to build a brand.
There are plenty of opportunities to accumulate titles, followers, credentials, and accomplishments.
But there is another opportunity available to every one of us, regardless of position, income, education, geography, or status:
The opportunity to be a good human being.
Not a perfect one.
A good one.
One who tries.
One who learns.
One who apologizes.
One who grows.
One who understands that kindness and accountability can occupy the same room.
One who knows that empathy does not require abandoning standards.
One who recognizes that strength does not require hardness.
One who knows that showing up does not always require having the right words.
Sometimes it simply requires refusing to let another human being feel invisible.
One who leaves people, organizations, communities, and perhaps even this world a little better than they found them.
If there truly is “very little competition” in that field, perhaps that is an invitation for the rest of us to crowd it.
I would be delighted to see that particular marketplace become considerably more competitive.
And in the coming weeks, I plan to share more of what this season away has taught me.
Some of it has been insightful.
Some of it has been eye-opening.
Some of it has been painful.
And some of it involves things we may believe we understand when we are standing safely on the outside looking in, until life places us inside the experience ourselves.
It hits differently from there.
There are things I understand now that I understood intellectually before.
That is not the same thing.
Living something has a way of removing abstraction.
I have learned about grief.
Leadership.
Healthcare.
Advocacy.
Systems.
Assumptions.
Relationships.
Resilience.
Being seen.
Being unseen.
Showing up.
And what it really means to recognize the humanity sitting in front of us.
There are stories I am ready to tell.
And perhaps some I am still learning how to tell.
I suspect both kinds will find their way here when the time is right.
So, Dear Reader, after being away for a little while, perhaps this is exactly where I needed to begin again.
Not with a grand leadership theory.
Not with a complicated framework.
Just a simple reminder:
Be a good human.
At work.
At home.
In leadership.
In friendship.
In grief.
In disagreement.
In ambition.
In success.
When someone needs you.
And especially when no one is watching.
The world has plenty of room for us.
Let’s fill it.
Jewel Quackenbush, MCC
Quackenbush Coaching LLC
