July 21, 2026 | Issue Archive​

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Who's at your table?

A little over ten years ago, I looked at my dining room table and realized it was empty.

Not empty of things.

There was mail on it. A laptop. A half-finished cup of coffee. Probably a permission slip that needed signing. The table was covered in the debris of a life in motion.

But then I heard a friend tell a story about his dining room table.

He talked about the difficult conversations with friends. The card games. Conversations about a passion project. Moments with his kids. All these pieces of a life that had unfolded around that table.

And I couldn’t help thinking about everything that hadn’t happened around mine.

There were barely family meals there, let alone evenings with friends.

I wrote in my journal:

“I hope my dining room table will be full of people and activity and meaning in my next 20 years (or however long I have).”

I reread those words recently, and my mind immediately went to the night before.

My wife and I were gathered around our dinner table with our three kids.

The table is full now.

And noisy!

Throughout the year, there are family members and friends and neighbors around it too. There is food. Conversation. Chaos. Lots of laughter.

I don’t take any of that for granted.

I’m incredibly grateful.

But here’s the part that’s easy to miss:

It didn’t change overnight. And it didn’t change by accident.

Ten years ago, my first marriage was ending.

The full table I’m describing today is a second one—a remarriage, a blended family, built in the years after everything came apart.

Nothing about that was quick.

None of it was luck.

The beginning came through the ending… not around it.

THIS ENDS NOW

The empty table is rarely about the table.

It’s about a pattern.

One of the five survival defaults I talk about is Isolation—and it may be the easiest one to miss.

Because isolation doesn’t always look like being alone.

Sometimes the most dangerous version of being alone is a full room where no one really sees you.

Surrounded, and still unseen.

And here’s the trap:

The people who resist community the hardest are often the people who have become really good at going it alone.

They’ve proven they can carry the weight.

They’ve built an identity around carrying it.

So when pressure rises, the instinct is to pull inward—right when connection may be the thing they need most.

I’m talking to myself here, if no one else.

You can calm yourself.

You can get clear.

You can make the brave choice.

You can learn to trust your own progress.

But eventually, you need someone else at the table.

THIS MOMENT MATTERS

Community over Isolation is the fifth choice of Radical Adaptability™.

And in some ways, I think it’s the hardest. Because it asks something the other four don’t:

It asks you to let people in.

When I left Nashville, my therapist, Jonathan, told me something I’ve never forgotten:

“My hope is that you find a community of belonging.”

I found it.

But not because it simply found me.

I stopped declining the invitations.

That line is in the book I’ve been writing, Choose Your Ending™—spoken to a character standing very close to where I once stood.

The book is a fable. But that part is true.

So this week, three questions.

Don’t rush them.

Who’s at your table right now?

Who do you need there—but haven’t invited in?

Who are you grateful for—and have you told them?

The table was never meant for one.

Default is not destiny.

Up we go—

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