Remember the kids’ table? The wobbly card table pushed into the corner of the room, your elbows on your knees and cups precariously squished in between too many plates. Remember trying in vain to hear what the adults were saying? But the chaos around you drowned out everything and you could only hear every third word.
Remember waiting and waiting and waiting until you were old enough to be invited to the “big table.”
Remember sitting at the “big table”? Adults talking fast with and at each other. Maybe you didn’t feel included. Maybe you were actually excluded. Told to be quiet. Or maybe you raised a hand. Maybe you were waiting patiently for someone to call on you. Only to have the conversation pass onto new topics before you were ever called on.
Remember maybe hating being at the table? Not liking the food, pushing it around, feeling bad about life and everything in it. Maybe you were told to sit there until you finished. Maybe you were told that other children would appreciate it. Maybe you got yelled at if you spilled the milk.
Remember being under the table? Curled around the adults feet, climbing under and through and over and around. Remember being told to “get out from under there”?
Remember doing some art at the table? Your papers and glue and markers messy and spread out all over. And then remember when your smear of blue went off the edge and someone yelled “What did you get on MY table?”
Remember the lunch table where the cool kids sat, with their cooler than yours shoes and their perfectly cool hair?
Remember the first time you went into the boardroom, and sat in the chair, ran your hands on the fine wood and thought “how am I here”?
Remember when you laid down on that operating table, and someone counted down while you faded off to sleep, your life literally in their hands?
Remember all the tables you sat at? On? Under? Remember all the people who didn’t allow you to show up, or talk, or feel welcomed? Remember all the tables. Most of us can remember those tables in our bones. Deep in our sense of self, we are sitting at someone else’s table, not feeling like we belong there.
Most of us keep trying to find the words, the relationships, the jobs that will make us feel whole. Most of us are waiting for someone else to take our hand and help us feel like we belong. Not just at the table, but in our own skin. With our time, our heart, our money. We are afraid to come to the table that is our own lives.
Sometimes, even if we are invited with kindness and love and generosity, we still have a hard time accepting our place at the table. We are still the little kid, raising our hands or trying hard not to spill the milk. We still have a hard time knowing that we can speak, share, love, give. We struggle to feel the wood grain with our fingers and know that we deserve to be there. We struggle to know that we are just as smart, just as funny, just as capable as every other person around that table.
But what if, instead of working to know you belong at the table…you came to truly believe…in your heart of hearts…that the truth was
Actually, it’s your table.
And that changes everything.
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