Being in Each Other’s Orbit
· Being
Who gets your best attention, and who gets whatever is left?
There is something humbling about returning to the place where you began. You remember the uncertainty underneath your ambition, the things you were trying to prove, and how much it mattered when someone welcomed you into the room. Years later, you can see what was harder to recognize then: your life was taking shape through people who chose to give you their time.
I felt that returning to Phoenix this past week, where I started my career. I was there with my Rule29 and O’Neil Printing teams for Phoenix Design Week, sharing my first conference talk about Being HumanKind and signing books afterward. AIGA had helped connect me to a creative community early in my career, opening up relationships locally and nationally. Coming back to share something this personal made me grateful for the people who had helped me find my way before I knew where I was going.
You probably have people like that, too. Someone who made the introduction, gave you an opportunity, asked a question that changed your thinking, or stayed beside you when things were difficult. Their names may never appear on your résumé, but their influence is everywhere in your life. We often tell our stories through what we accomplished, even though we understand ourselves more fully when we remember who was there.
The People Who Change Our Direction
The conference theme was Orbit, an invitation to consider the relationships, conversations, and creative forces surrounding our work. The organizers used the phrase “gravity by design,” which stayed with me. We each follow a path, but we are continually influenced by the people around us. Our direction is rarely ours alone.
There was a fitting space connection in the program. Ben Shown and Megan Greco from Blink UX presented their collaboration with NASA on its digital experience and Horizon Design System. Their work involved helping people find and understand stories about something much larger than themselves. It gave the Orbit theme a literal connection to space, alongside the human connections unfolding throughout the conference.
I kept thinking about how someone can enter our lives and change what feels possible. A teacher sees an ability we haven’t recognized. A friend challenges an assumption we have mistaken for truth. A colleague trusts us before we quite trust ourselves. Their attention changes something, and we carry that change forward.
But recognizing who influenced us raises another question: What is it like to be in our orbit? What do people experience when they spend time with us? Do they feel able to contribute, disagree, admit uncertainty, or be themselves? We are part of the environment in which other people are trying to live and grow.
Two Sundays in the Same Room
One of the gifts of the week was getting to spend time with Tad Carpenter, whose design and illustration work I had admired long before meeting him. Tad is funny, thoughtful, incredibly talented, and deeply connected to family, Kansas City, and the people who have shaped him. Getting to know him brought more meaning to work I already appreciated. There is always more to a person than the part we first encounter.
His SUNday Suns project is a practice of creating a sun every Sunday. He describes its beginnings as “No client, no agenda, no real goal, just play.” That is a generous permission to give yourself in a culture that keeps asking what an activity will produce, earn, or accomplish. Something can deserve a place in our lives because of what happens within us when we do it.
Then Edgar, one of our designers, pointed out that Sunday is also when I write these Being HumanKind reflections. I had admired Tad’s practice without recognizing that shared rhythm. Different lives and different work, but each returning to something meaningful, week after week. I don’t believe in coincidences, and there was something a little magical about discovering that connection while we were together.
It also made me think about the difference between appreciating something and making room for it. We can admire creativity, friendship, reflection, or community without giving any of them much space in our week. Tad’s practice offered a useful question: What do you keep saying matters that you rarely allow yourself time to experience?
When the Audience Shares Back
After my talk, people came up to have their books signed and began telling me about the people who had shaped their lives. Some had already reached out to thank them. Others were realizing there was someone they still wanted to contact. Hearing where the ideas connected was both encouraging and deeply moving.
Sharing Being HumanKind live gave me something writing alone cannot always provide: a chance to listen as people connect these ideas to their own experiences. A memory surfaced, someone came to mind, and a conversation opened. I was grateful people wanted to take the book home. I was also grateful they trusted me with a little of the life they were bringing to it.
Those exchanges reminded me how much we carry about one another without ever saying it. We remember encouragement from years ago while the person who offered it may have no idea. We assume they understand what they meant to us, or decide it would be strange to mention it now. Gratitude stays inside us, waiting for an occasion.
Research suggests our hesitation can rest on a mistaken prediction. In experiments by Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley, people writing gratitude letters underestimated how positive recipients would feel and overestimated how awkward the letters would make them feel. They expected the exchange to be less welcome than it actually was. That gives us a reason to question the discomfort keeping the message unwritten.
The person you are thinking about may be glad to hear from you. You don’t need to explain an entire relationship or account for every year that has passed. Tell them what you remember and why it stayed. Let them discover something good about their influence that only you can tell them.
The Cost of Our Hurry
There is a harder part to this reflection. We can sincerely value people while giving them distracted versions of ourselves. We can be responsive to strangers, generous with clients, and patient in public, then arrive home with very little attention left. The people most confident of our love can become the people we most often ask to wait.
I recognize that possibility in myself. There is always something to finish, answer, improve, or prepare. Even during a conversation, I can be mentally moving toward what comes next. Caring about someone does not automatically mean they experience me as present.
[quote:The people closest to us live with our habits, not just our intentions.]
Who gets your most attentive self? Who gets the rushed answer, the glance at the phone, or the promise to talk later? These questions deserve honesty without becoming another exercise in self-criticism. Once we recognize a pattern, we have somewhere specific to practice.
Research on listening helps explain why that practice matters. Across five experiments, researchers found that high-quality listening reduced people’s immediate feelings of loneliness when they shared experiences of social rejection. Listening conveyed attention, understanding, and positive intentions. The findings suggest that how we receive someone’s story can affect how alone they feel while telling it.
Being generously present can begin with resisting the urge to interrupt, asking a question before offering advice, or putting away the thing competing for our attention. We can let someone’s answer change our understanding instead of fitting it into what we already assumed. We can make a conversation feel less like a task and more like a place where someone is welcome.
Discernment Is How We Make Room
Our attention is limited, which makes discernment essential. Being present requires choices about what we take on, what can wait, and what we need to protect. Sometimes the caring response is to stay longer. Sometimes it is to say we cannot listen well right now, arrange a better time, and follow through.
Why develop discernment? Because we want an aligned life, where our actions reflect what we believe matters. We want love to become time together, respect to become a willingness to listen, and gratitude to become words someone actually hears. Alignment becomes practical when we examine the distance between those values and our routines.
That examination may ask us to disappoint someone, leave something unfinished, or admit that a familiar commitment no longer fits. It may also ask us to receive care rather than always being the one who provides it. Relationships need enough room for people to contribute to each other. We can make ourselves so busy being useful that we become difficult to know.
Go Be
This week, choose one person whose influence you still carry and thank them with a specific memory. Tell them what happened, what it helped you believe or do, and why you remember. If you can no longer reach that person, share their story or offer someone else the kind of care you received. Give their influence another place to go.
Choose one conversation to approach differently, especially with someone who often gets your divided attention. Put the distraction away, ask something you do not already know, and let the answer take the time it needs. Afterward, consider what you learned that you might otherwise have missed.
Finally, look at one recurring demand on your time. Does it support the life and relationships you want to build, or does it keep displacing them? Make one honest adjustment, even a small one. Give something you value an actual place in your week.
Think about the people who helped you become yourself. They had responsibilities, distractions, and plenty of other things to do when they made room for you. Someone in your life could use that same attention now, perhaps without knowing how to ask. When they look back on this season of their life, what will they remember about being in your orbit?
Go be curious. Go be grateful. Go be generously present. Go be HumanKind.
New here? I’m glad you found your way into this orbit. Thoughts on Being is my weekly reflection on living and leading with more courage, compassion, and clarity, delivered every Sunday. This week, travel gave Sunday a Monday arrival. Thanks for being here!