#32B - Fables in Community

Inspo from Mason Tang. Connection and Gratitude. International Women's Day yesterday - Gail!

I met a friend,

Mason Tang

, through Coaching Corner. He’s Course 6 at MIT, lived in Conner 2, close to where my brother and sister lived in Burton 3 and was a longtime engineer / manager at Google / Airtable / Grammarly. But his LinkedIn byline more accurately describes who he is and continues to become:

heart, mind, hand | joy & creativity coach

Mens et manus - mind and hand - is MIT’s well known motto, Tim the Beaver’s, aka nature’s engineer’s, rallying cry. But Mason’s gift too is Cor, the heart, that universal fount of all things human. Heart comes through in his art: singing, instrumental music (rediscovered in adulthood) and of course dance. Ask Mason himself who he is, he will respond “a dancer”. Here’s a clip from his body movement workshop that he offers called Wiggles & Feels (cue the glee and also the depth):

Mason is a moving, breathing concoction of balance: the logical and the emotional, the steady and the sprouting, the generative and the receiving. In this amalgam, he creates space for others to thrive, to reflect and to be present in concrete ways. He does this through his coaching practice, his relationships, his workshops and random acts of connection.

A few weeks ago, he spent an hour in San Francisco’s Financial District sitting on a street corner with a sign offering free pep talks. Mason is considered and confident, but felt anxious in the unfolding uncertainty of what he would uncover. Courageously sitting alone, he eventually built tethers to strangers through silent smiles, shared shouts of mutual appreciation and welcomed deeper conversations. He connected with the diversity that is San Francisco; office workers, the unhoused, truck drivers and nourished in their shared human stories of hopes, fears and family.

He felt energized by this, immersed in gratitude for bearing witness and presence to the joy of mundane, yet extraordinary, human connection. He not only nudged the people around him towards a little more lightness, but did so for himself too.

I’ve spent the last month struggling to find ways to resist forces intent on meanness, cruelty, small heartedness and misery. I’ve attempted to do so through small acts of writing (mean spirits, 2415 Eisenhower) but I have also realized that these wind up self indulgent and limited in impact. Reminded of Hannah Arendt’s warnings that cynicism and loneliness are precursors to authoritarianism, I knew that I wanted to get out into the world, with other humans, to till a soil from which we can harvest an antidote.

That antidote is relational trust. It is a trust that permeates a society or culture that impels courage to connect and offering others the benefit of the doubt. The trust is a mutualism or reciprocality that the Ancient Greeks called xenia. It is a rejection of philosopher David Hume’s assertion in Essays, that:

…in contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest.

Which interestingly, Hume himself too waves off with the very next sentence:

…strange that a maxim should be true in politics which is false in fact.

Even to Hume, this trust and pro-sociality is the default manner of human, one of kindness and connection. But the lessons of thriving autocracies show that the relational trust can be usurped and needs edification and cultivation to flourish

Mason and

Kelly Liu

have provided a template for building connection with strangers. I just needed a partner in crime - that person would be Gail who lent me the book, the Serviceberry.

Quick Aside: What’s up with these MIT alums all turned coaches with their huge hearts searching to build connection in a sometimes prosopagnostic world!

Gail

Gail is a darling friend whom I spend quite a bit of my life with. I wander into her and her husband’s, Tim, house at random. I leave a car, a guitar or two there and help myself to the beers in the garage fridge. Our families have traveled Italy together where I relied on their lingua italiana (despite being Brits they lived for years in Rome where their children were born), their artistic sophistication and culinary wisdom (as well as Gail’s second to none, planning aptitude). She was gracious when Tim, a fellow cellist, and I snickered at the woodwinds rushing during Bruckner 8 at an otherwise lovely performance by La Fenice Orchestra. She is a twin and mother and understands the needs of my daughters on a level that surpasses my studied intuition. And if all that’s not enough, she commands a more intimate familiarity with Rilke’s poetry in his native sprache, because she’s a real polyglot, compared with my one year of Deutsch in sixth grade at Frederick-Eugens Gymnasium, with Frau Seibert.

Community Gratitude Exercise

So yeah Gail is a bad ass. We had both been feeling a little unmoored with the state of the world and frustrated with how we might act. Gail and I both believe in the power of small nudges over time, like butterfly flutters that transform into storms halfway around the world, and we concocted a plan to spend a couple hours connecting with strangers on a random Saturday. We showed up at the downtown plaza in Menlo Park, near Kepler’s Bookstore and Cafe Borrone to set up a folding table and an easel with a large write pad, upon which were scrawled the words “Make your Saturday Sunny & Sublime. Happiness is Free!” Gail made sure we weren’t violating any public ordinances.

We laid out some poetry books, including Wislawa Szymborska’s poem, turned children’s book, entitled Love at First Sight and the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. And we began asking strangers passing by whether they wanted to share a small piece of gratitude, hope or even grief with their community by writing something down on a sticky note. We initially encountered avoidant glances of skepticism from those accelerating past or widening their path around us. But over time, the curious stopped to ask what we were doing, to which Gail would respond:

We’re here to share our gratitude for people in our community and we’re hoping that you might share something that you’re grateful for today.

And people would pause and write something down and stick it on our gratitude board. The examples were earnest and often simple:

• my family and my girlfriend

• life

• people in right action

• the sun

• dear friends

• pancakes (which was oft repeated)

To others we asked if they’d like to hear a poem recited. Two friends demurred offering that “[they were] not cultured enough to understand poetry,” to which I showed them they were with Billy Collins’ Introduction to Poetry. This couple obliged to Rilke’s Let this Darkness Be a Belltower:

We even convinced Nikki and Rei to jointly write a poem with us, letting spontaneity and creativity mingle into an invocation:

It is almost spring
cherry blossoms grow into a new season
out my window, I change too.
we are always shedding skin
and reemerging
leap into the year anew!

 - Nikki, Rei, Gail, Ben - 2025

And we excavated deep conversations. We met B, who is on a journey of recovery and has grown wary and weary of the toxically positive. He sat with us a while to talk of children, connection and gratitude (“two shoes that I can slip my feet into in the morning.”) We met Sandy who adored and wrote poetry and has struggled to find outlets for this passion. As Stanford annoyingly has cut its creative writing resources I pointed her towards the workshops at Foothill college, often headed up by Elizabeth Biller Chapman, from our first Fable. And as all children know best with their wisdom of wonder and play, this young man shared with us that he was “grateful for the big bang,” as his mom pored through Love at First Sight.

At times throngs formed with a dozen folk, chatting amongst one another, sharing in the simple gifts of the world: the sun, fostered service pets, company. Kepler’s employees, on their break, came by to luxuriate in the quotidian and sublime. Young men, friends of our children and multigenerational families joined, intrigued by the curiosity and innate sociality redolent in homo sapiens.

We also had some observations. We were often asked “What organization are you from?” to which we would respond “We’re just two friends.” A visiting couple from Minnesota told us “I could tell that the two of you are believers… are you believers?” to which Gail diplomatically replied that it was complicated but that she was not (I almost guffawed… I know, I know, I should work on my judgment). We also noticed a father with his teenage sons in tow, rushing past us to make the crosswalk light, responding “No!” when asked to share gratitude.

There exists, still, a cynicism of each other, a sense that we are all knaves, looking to gain something in our quest of self-interest. Even the well meaning Minnesotans harbored this implied, subconscious notion that one must be of faith to nurture gratitude. I don’t blame them at all; we’ve all had those experiences where we have felt transactionally taken advantage of. The structure of the world has at times created a sense of Jamil Zaki’s pervasive social introversion, a world that feels safer alone than one full of engagement. My substack acquaintance

Gunnar

reasons well why this is with:

But yet to Gail and me, the people we encountered offered their hearts to one another. In our two hour experiment, we noticed joy amongst those we spoke with, precisely because we all connected with one another. We were alchemized from the unfamiliar into the acquainted, through the simple act of communion. It is said like sleep, happiness cannot be achieved through striving. Mark Greif puts it more aptly:

The pursuit of happiness has to enter occurrence, and raw occurrence can’t be saved or savored.

But from a willingness to dance in the uncertainty of relational trust, we create the occurrences that will linger a bit longer, long enough to be enjoyed.

I believe and hope that with our collective acts we have collectively flapped our wings towards a world with more connection, and consequent trust, needed as an antidote to those seeking to exploit loneliness and disconnection.

In the end we collected maybe 75 notes of gratitude. Kepler’s agreed to share our communal gratitude board with their community, posting it up. Gail and I breathed a joyous exhalation, had some pastries at Little Sky Bakery and continued to ripen our already deep friendship.

Big ups to Mason for the gift of inspiration! How will you help build this relational trust?

Lastly

It was International Women’s Day yesterday. I generally balk at the idea that women are celebrated but one day of the year. Our lesson in gratitude is that we should be celebrating the women of our lives 31,536,000 seconds each year. And I am so grateful to have so many amazing and dear women as part of my life. But whatever, in honor of IWD, I am grateful for this particular woman in my world. Cheers to you Gail, Lassie!