What is a Good Life? #167
Gifts, Rituals, & The Path To Belonging with Bruce Anderson
Hello and welcome to What is a Good Life? A project exploring the big questions around how we live and what actually matters.
This week, I’m reflecting on my conversation with Bruce Anderson, Executive Director of the Core Gift Institute. We speak about the three kinds of glue that hold relationships, communities, and the world together: gifts, welcoming, and ritual. It is a conversation that reminds us of what we’ve forgotten about being human.
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Take care, Mark
1. My Weekly Reflection
“The Western world has reduced significant rituals to insignificant gestures.” - Malidoma Somé
Bruce mentioned Malidoma Somé, from the Dagara tribe in Burkina Faso, as someone who greatly influenced him. Having spent time with him, Malidoma shared a misconception about his work in the West.
People assumed the village elders sent him to the Western world each year to share teachings about global crises: water, war, and what wasn’t yet commonly called global warming. But Malidoma corrected that assumption. The council sent him because they believed:
“The Western world had reduced significant rituals to insignificant gestures.”
This line really stopped me in my tracks in the interview.
Bruce then quipped: “I realised how true that was. You know, that there’s funerals during lunch hours now in cities so people can come. I mean, I’m making light of that but these four kinds of rituals are all tied to belonging, this multicultural idea that there are four paths for you to belong.”
The four paths are rituals through which we connect to spirit, self, nature, and other humans.
Upon hearing this, a memory came to mind.
I was back home in Ireland last year, and during a conversation with my mother, she mentioned that when driving back to Galway, where she grew up, she likes to leave the motorway several exits early because she enjoys the feeling of driving through familiar places.
I said the last time I went, I got off the motorway early to be stuck in the traffic in a town called Loughrea, reminiscing about all the times we drove through it on the way to my granny’s home.
From there, I took some country roads where the summer breaks I spent every year came to life - whether it was a pub where I’d play pool and eat cheese and onion crisps and a Cadbury’s chocolate bar, a GAA club where I watched games or attended summer camps, or all the fields we’d venture into on our own.
In a culture that is hell-bent on speed, convenience, and innovation, I continually get the dreaded sense of: to what end? What becomes of this collapsed experience and time we save.
This morning as I write this from my office desk, that looks out onto a crossroads in my neighbourhood, I see a man walking his two dogs. It is just past six in the morning and the footpaths are almost empty.
He is around my age and looks relatively fit and strong. He holds onto his two dogs with one hand and he holds his phone in the other hand. His eyes are fixated on the phone.
His dogs go about vibrantly sniffing what is available to them and the three move slowly through the neighbourhood. Almost like a slow procession.
Whenever I am walking close by him, I aways hear the distant and undulating sounds of videos being scrolled as the noise of the nearby traffic rises and falls.
2. This Week’s Questions
What rituals create your own sense of a good life?
Where do you sense you have collapsed a ritual into an empty gesture?
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Thanks for reading What is a Good Life?
3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast
4. Full Episode - Gifts, Rituals, & The Path To Belonging with Bruce Anderson - What is a Good Life? #167
Listen to or watch the full conversation with Bruce Anderson below.
About Me
I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.
Hello Mark.
Yes, your conversation with Bruce was a gift.
I haven't listened to your podcast in a while. As I listened, I kept asking myself who I was. So many deep insights here, that I somehow felt ready to receive today.
First (chronologically), I see I am different (in some way, I have long known this) because I have asked the big questions, starting with Why was I born, for 63 years, since I was 4.
I visited Alaska and far NW US, in 1972, and recall the indigenous people talking about gifting. But at 14, I couldn't grasp the significance of what seemed like a ritual. I certainly hadn't grasped the difference between ritual and ??? sign? (lost the word your guest used quoting the person from Burkina Faso). So thank you.
Also, my business partner for my Creative Critical Thinking training company has just completed our 12 week training with a group of formerly homeless. Only 2 completed the program, but they immediately started using the insights gained to accelerate their life transition, to be more present for their family in one case, and themselves in the other.
I have noted that we do heal, bit by bit, maybe never completely, when we are able to use our wounds to understand how to help others. As my first spiritual guide shared, there is always old stuff ready to come to light.
And yes, access to nature is critical. I've been privileged to live out in the country on 40 acres in Michigan for 38 years. I never tire, as Bruce says, of looking out of my big kitchen windows, toward my yard, compost piles, lilac and bamboo hedge, daffodils, garden, orchard, meadow, woods.
There are times I still long for people who could help me understand the philosophy and science I seek to translate for others. But maybe part of my gift is to remember a part of how it feels to be clueless about important things. Like "Why am I here?" and even "What's going on?" And to keep going trying to figure it out.