What is a Good Life? #175
Closing the Gap Between Values & Life with Jennifer Garvey Berger
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 sharing my conversation with Jennifer Garvey Berger - author, global leadership coach, and founder of Cultivating Leadership. It's a conversation that explores values in a way that rarely contains such nuance, acknowledgement of shadow, and lived experience. Values is a topic that is usually reduced to platitudes. This conversation doesn’t do that. This week’s reflection is a little different, as it is not from the podcast but a lecture I gave last week.
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Take care, Mark
1. My Weekly Reflection
I am sitting on a small stage with a microphone stand in front of me, a bright light beaming into my eyes.
A packed room is creating a wall of sound as strangers and friends connect over the question I have just asked them to contemplate.
“Can you recall a recent or significant moment of fulfilment?”
It is part of a lecture and participatory talk I have been invited to give in a bar, of all places, to around eighty people.
I ask people to shout out short answers from the crowd:
“Dancing”
“Hugging my godson”
“A walk in the woods”
“Being on a mountain”
“Walking the dog”
“Feeling part of a tribe”
“Tomatoes…perfect tomatoes”
The simplicity of responses to this question never ceases to make me feel so human. The same is true later when I ask the big enchilada of “What is a Good Life?”
I am enjoying myself so much that when my loud calls to invite them back from their one-on-one conversations are either not heard or ignored, I briefly break into an Irish song to get their attention again.
“Óró, sé do bheatha ‘bhaile” — said in a loop a couple of times.
Loosely meaning “Welcome home.”
We sit for almost an hour together after it was due to end, with people asking very reflective questions. Not the monologues masquerading as questions that some settings seem to naturally attract.
Amidst it all, one lady asks, “Is this a question that only the privileged get to contemplate?”
It’s a great question.
I sit with it for a moment in dead silence.
I briefly muse that I know many privileged people, who by their own accounts, don’t experience what they consider a good life. I also recount experiences of joy and generosity that I and the people I interviewed encountered in much less affluent settings.
It reminded me later of a moment a man shared with me in an interview. He had just flown to Dhaka in a fancy plane and was staying in a nice hotel. He was there meeting a relief worker his organisation supported financially. She had been at the frontline of several global humanitarian disasters. She was wearing well-worn sandals in an office with no window, where there was space for one, and a fan that was doing little to keep the sweltering heat at bay. She looked at him and his travelling party and said with genuine pity, not a hint of judgement:
“All of you people in the West need so much to be happy.”
So I suggested that the experience of a good life doesn’t seem to be so neatly contained by our ideas of privilege.
Earlier in the talk I had mentioned the horrific killing of 150 schoolgirls in Iran in passing in response to another question.
She said she was Iranian, and that for four months she had had no contact with her parents. And when she spoke to them a few weeks ago, she was amazed to find that her parents were dancing and enjoying a dinner in that moment within the horror of it all.
I don’t think this question is a privilege; more that we live in systems that want us to ignore it - that want us to go on miserably ignoring what actually matters to us and what really moves us.
2. This Week’s Questions
Can you recall a recent or significant moment of strong fulfilment?
What values of yours and your life have the greatest gap between them?
Thanks for reading What is a Good Life?
3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast
4. Full Episode - Closing the Gap Between Values & Life with Jennifer Garvey Berger - What is a Good Life? #175
Listen to or watch the full conversation with Jennifer Garvey Berger below.
For Apple podcast click here.
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.