We Were Never Meant To Grow Alone: What We Carry Into One Another’s Lives

I was sitting on the couch when the text came in. Nothing particularly interesting was happening. It was an ordinary day. Maybe even a Tuesday.

Across from me was the television. On the stand beneath it was a framed photograph of Jody and me on our wedding day. It had been there long enough that I probably wasn’t consciously noticing it anymore. Some things become so much a part of a room that you stop seeing them unless something gives you a reason to look again.

Jabriel had stood beside me that day as one of my groomsmen.

My phone buzzed. It was him. Do you have a minute to talk?

I’ve known Jabriel for more than a decade. We worked together for about six months when we were at Punch Bowl Social in Portland. Six months isn’t particularly long in the chronology of a career. But chronology has never been a very good measure of relationship.

Jabriel isn’t my brother by blood. But he is one of the people I call Brother.

We’ve had some version of this exchange hundreds of times over the years. Do you have a minute? Absolutely, Brother.

The phone rang.

We talked for a moment, and then Jabriel asked me a question I had never been asked before. Would I marry him and Haylee? I don’t mean would I approve of them getting married. I mean would I actually marry them. Stand in front of their family and friends. Lead the ceremony. Pronounce them married.

I was stunned.

I am a restaurant consultant and an executive coach. I have a law degree. I write about leadership. I have opened restaurants, run restaurants, coached leaders, built budgets, written employee handbooks, and spent an unreasonable percentage of my adult life thinking about organizational systems.

Wedding officiant was not on the résumé. Fortunately, the Universal Life Church has a website and apparently a very low barrier to entry. A few clicks later, I was ordained.

But before any of that, I asked the obvious question. Why me?

Their answer has stayed with me. It feels so right because you knew each of us separately, and you introduced us, and now you know us together.

I looked across the room. At the photograph of Jody and me on our wedding day.

…

Years earlier, Haylee told me she was going to Portland Cocktail Week.

Haylee had been my Assistant General Manager when I was at Le Grand Bistro & Oyster Bar in Denver. By then, I had returned from Portland, but I still knew plenty of people there. Including Jabriel.

When Haylee told me she was going, I remember thinking that she needed to meet him. Not because I thought they should date. Certainly not because I thought they should get married. I wasn’t playing matchmaker.

That wasn’t it. I knew Haylee. I knew Jabriel. They were smart. Interesting. Curious. I thought they had things in common. I thought they would enjoy knowing each other.

So I connected them. That was it. There was no strategy. No expected outcome. I simply thought two people I cared about might enjoy knowing one another.

What happened next belonged to them. It still does. Years later, my phone rang.

…

I’ve spent much of my life around people. That comes with the territory when you spend decades in hospitality. Restaurants are ecosystems disguised as businesses.

People arrive. People leave. Someone starts as a host and becomes a manager. Someone trains you on your first day and disappears from your life three months later. Someone works beside you for years and eventually becomes someone you used to know. Someone else works with you for six months and is still calling you Brother more than a decade later.

There are people I worked with for years whose lives I know nothing about today. And there are people who barely occupied a page in my professional history who somehow remain characters in the book.

Matthew is the one person from my time at Rock Bottom in Chicago with whom I still have a relationship. Hundreds of people passed through that part of my life. Matthew remained.

Bryan never actually worked with me. I wanted to hire him as an Assistant General Manager at Punch Bowl Social. I offered him the job. He turned it down. The relationship I expected us to have never happened. The friendship did.

Jabriel and I worked together for about six months. He is getting married this October, and he has asked me to stand beside him when he does.

Duration and consequence are not the same thing.

We like to think they are. We measure relationships in years. Tenure. Anniversaries. Time spent together. But some people occupy enormous stretches of our lives without fundamentally altering them. Others pass through quickly and leave something behind that we carry for decades.

And most of the time, we have no idea what we have left behind in them. That part has been making me wonder.

If none of us grows alone, what have we been carrying into one another’s lives all this time?

…

I used to think about growth primarily as something an individual did.

You learn. You experience. You fail. You adjust. You become.

I still believe all of that.

But I’m no longer sure there is such a thing as individual growth in the way we sometimes imagine it.

I can point to things about the way I lead, coach, organize, think, and make decisions and call them mine. And they are mine. But where did they come from?

My organizational system is unmistakably mine. Ask anyone who has ever attempted to move something in my office. Actually, don’t.

Fifteen years ago, if I walked into my office and discovered that something had moved half an inch, my first thought might have been: Someone is intentionally messing with me.

Today, I would notice exactly the same half inch. I would laugh. And then I would put it back.

I do have standards.

But even that highly particular Andrew system isn’t entirely Andrew. It is an amalgam. Pieces of systems other people showed me. Ideas I read. Practices I observed. Things that worked in one restaurant and failed in another. Things I borrowed from people whose names I may no longer remember. Things I changed because someone else needed them to work differently.

I once worked with a client named Caleb for whom my color-coding system would have been completely useless. Caleb is colorblind. So we used symbols.

The colors weren’t the idea. Differentiation was the idea.

And I understood my own system better because I had to stop trying to hand him its expression and figure out what principle underneath it was actually worth carrying forward.

I brought something into that relationship. So did Caleb. Something different left it. Neither of us could have created exactly that exchange alone.

…

Maybe that’s what I’ve missed when I’ve thought about growth.

We talk about influence as though one person gives and another receives. Teacher and student. Mentor and mentee. Leader and employee. Coach and client.

But living things don’t behave quite that neatly. Put different plants into the same soil and something more complicated begins to happen.

Some compete for the same resources. Some take different things. Some return something another needs. Some protect. Some crowd. Some provide shade. Some need more light.

Certain crops grow well beside one another not because they are alike, but because they aren’t. Beans and corn don’t need to become more similar to flourish together. Their difference is part of what makes the relationship work.

I’ve seen that in people too.

Mark and I didn’t become more like one another while we worked together. We affected one another. We learned from one another. We brought different instincts, experiences, and ways of thinking into the same environment, and both of us continued growing. Not toward sameness. Alongside difference.

My marriage works that way. Jody is fiercely independent. She is spontaneous. I am trusting. I give easily. And I am, perhaps, slightly more structured.

Fine. I am rigid as a railroad tie. Happy now?

Over the years, Jody hasn’t become dependent. She has learned that she can depend on me.

I haven’t become spontaneous. I have become incrementally more capable of spontaneity.

Neither of us had to surrender who we were for something new to become possible between us. We changed the conditions for one another. Maybe that’s what healthy relationships do at their best. They don’t make us grow. They help create conditions in which growth becomes possible.

…

But ecosystems aren’t always gentle. And neither are we.

At Punch Bowl Social, I hired a shift lead named Raina. I liked her when I interviewed her. I believed she would be good at the job. She was. She became a valuable member of our leadership team. And for some reason I can no longer even remember, she irritated me.

I was hard on her.

Not demanding in the way a leader sometimes needs to be demanding because someone is capable of more. I was dismissive. Short. Sometimes probably mean.

Jody noticed it before I was willing to see it. She called my attention to the way I was treating Raina, and I changed my behavior. But when I look back now, changing my behavior isn’t the part that matters most.

This is:

I didn’t give Raina the leadership she deserved.

I had hired her. I knew she belonged on the team. And then I participated in creating an environment in which approaching me could reasonably have felt like an imposition.

I can’t tell you what Raina carried away from that experience. I don’t get to write that part of her story. I hope she is thriving. But hope doesn’t erase my responsibility for what I carried into her life while our lives overlapped.

That’s part of the ecology too.

We don’t only nourish. We affect the soil. We cast shade. We take up space.

Sometimes we make it harder for something beside us to flourish. And sometimes it takes another person standing nearby to help us see what we’re doing. Jody did that for me.

What I did with the Recognition was mine. But I didn’t arrive at it alone.

…

I have lived in Milwaukee, Oxford, OH, St. Paul, Phoenix, Hartford, Chicago, Clearwater, Portland, and Denver.

Different cities. Different cultures. Different expectations. Different people.

And everywhere I went, there I was.

Jody and I have a saying we borrowed from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: No matter where you go, there you are.

I’ve always loved that. You can’t run away from yourself.

But lately I’ve begun to hear something else underneath it. No matter where you go, there you are. Yes. And you never arrive empty-handed.

You bring people with you. Not literally.

You bring what passed between you. A question someone taught you to ask. A standard someone held. A kindness you remember. A way of running a meeting. A sentence from a book. A mistake you don’t want to repeat. A possibility someone helped you see. A behavior you encountered and decided, No. Not that. A friend who once asked one more question instead of giving you an answer. A leader who made room for your voice. A person you failed to make room for. A spouse who showed you that noticing something and deciding what it means are two different acts.

After enough years, the origins become difficult to separate. Everything composts. The soil becomes ours. But that doesn’t mean we made it alone.

…

I sometimes wonder about all the people whose outcomes I will never know.

Not in a sad way. I don’t need to know. I don’t keep a scoreboard. I don’t need someone I worked with in 1998 to find me and explain how a conversation we had changed their life.

Maybe it didn’t. Maybe they don’t remember me at all. That’s okay too.

Because contribution doesn’t require centrality. And it certainly doesn’t require ownership.

Most of what we carry into another person’s life stops belonging to us the moment they receive it. They may use it. Change it. Reject it. Combine it with something someone else gave them. Pass it forward twenty years later in a form we wouldn’t recognize. Or forget it entirely.

What happens next is theirs.

That’s what makes Jabriel’s phone call so extraordinary to me. Not because I introduced two people who are now getting married. I didn’t create their relationship. They did.

I happened to be allowed to see one thread. One. Out of thousands.

I knew Haylee separately. I knew Jabriel separately. Something each of them had carried into my life allowed me to recognize that perhaps they should know one another.

So I introduced them. Years passed. And one ordinary day, my phone buzzed.

Do you have a minute to talk?

Absolutely, Brother.

This October, I will stand with them while they get married. I don’t know exactly what that moment will feel like yet. It hasn’t happened. Maybe I’ll look at Jabriel and remember those six months we worked together in Portland. Maybe I’ll look at Haylee and remember the great team we worked with at Le Grand. Maybe I’ll think about my own wedding and the photograph sitting across from the couch where I received his text.

Maybe I’ll think about all of it. Or maybe I’ll just be present. Because their marriage isn’t the conclusion of a story I started. Their story was never mine to begin with.

And afterward, they will continue into their life together. I’ll go home with Jody.

We’ll all keep encountering people. Carrying things in. Taking things with us. Leaving things behind. Most of it unrecorded. Much of it unnoticed. Some of it beautiful. Some of it messy. Some of it painful.

And occasionally, if we’re very lucky, life lets us see one thread long enough to recognize the larger truth.

None of us ever becomes entirely by ourselves.

We were never meant to grow alone.

…

A Question to Carry With You

What are you carrying into the lives around you—and what are you carrying because someone else once placed it into yours?