Thanks Susan for this generous response. I enjoyed the story of your teenage daughter, of her desire to remember and name a festival and mixing up the names, as I did the opening up of new cultural sharing about your family in response to reading this post.

When challenged by your heartfelt inquiry in Dialogues, I knew I wanted to seek you out. Now, after reading both of your blog posts, combined with my experience of you in our group’s discourse, I feel that desire even more. Thank you for your written offerings here. It’s such a feast of information about customs and cultures unfamiliar to me. I felt compelled to Google those names and words I wanted to learn more about, and hope I may, overtime, learn even more of your personal connection to some details you’ve shared with us here.

What I do know, is that your themes of slowing down, taking deliberate action, honoring self-care, and trusting others, is in fact, what relationally is all about, (in my playbook anyway,) and that it’s these very qualities I see and admire most about your verbal offerings live and in vivo. Your ability to navigate the space with precision, tactfulness, grace and humility…(the slowing down) while also speaking directly about difficult material, has allowed me to become increasingly aware of the degree to which my emotional armor can still be ever-present—despite my professed willingness to “roll up my sleeves,” and get into the mess of it.

Additionally, I find myself thinking about how the customs of Ramadan, Shabbat and other spiritual traditions offer a psychic space for both self-reflection as well as a relational connection….just like in Dialogues. And as elsewhere in humanity, we often weave in and out of the unknown, learning new things, sometimes getting it, and sometimes not…and sometimes forgetting what we thought we got.

Like my teen daughter, offering us this at dinner just last week: “Happy Ramadan.” We look up puzzled, but engaged…um, well, Happy Ramadan to you.” She pauses and says, Oh, but I forgot to wish Carl that.” (Her long distance boyfriend, who’s Jewish.) Now, really confused, I say, “Carl is ..Jewish, and ..a Muslim, honey?” “Oh, wait, no, what’s today’s Jewish holiday, again? I remind her, “Rosh Hashanah!” “Yeah, that’s what I meant,” and as we join in her giggles.

My daughter, more familiar with the traditions of my family, living primarily with me….just happens to be half Jewish. Her father grew up in a secular home and never learned nor taught her the customs of his Austrian Jewish heritage. In fact, she also has an older half-brother, Rajeev, who is the son of an immigrant Indian mother, and who has playfully joked that their father has two children, one boy, one girl, one “Jew-Rican,“ the other, a “Hin-Jew.”

Generational loss of cultural traditions is a whole other topic, I know. I’m hoping, however, no I’m trusting that one day, she too will slow down and be curious enough to engage with those yet unfamiliar parts of herself, which include, of course, those parts of her heritage left unexplored. Thanks again for sharing, Vivek.

Thanks for this very specific and detailed response Wendy. Much appreciated speaking with you, processing with you, in CORE Dialogues today. I haven’t checked the blog comments since May, so I missed this. Hope we can understand our Muslim and other clients and ourselves better through this shared experience of slowness.