Author: Amanda Duckett

Back to the Table

Posted on by Amanda Duckett

These are a few of my tables from just the last two weeks…

Hummus and lamb kabobs with a new friend for a three-hour lunch at The Peacock Mediterranean Grill where we poured our hearts out to each other about success, spotlights, burnout, and dreams, admitting we have both hid in bathroom stalls at events we were speaking out because our introversion is such a situation. 

Little plates of chicken salad croissants and sausage queso and mini-cakes from Nothing Bundt Cakes with 20 friends and family to celebrate a little punkin’ angel turning one. 

Barbeque chicken sandwiches with our friend who decided to brave the vulnerability elements and tell us about his recently broken heart that is stubbornly refusing to heal. 

Over steaming bowls of Salmon Panang Curry and cold glasses of Sauvignon Blanc with my oldest friend in Austin trying to solve for X regarding aging bodies, young adult kids, the election, and God. 

The table brings us together. It gives us something to do with our hands so our souls can open up. People bring the same needs to the table: hunger, thirst, cravings. We all have to eat. Perfectly griddled smash-burgers taste delicious to folks of every stripe. Even the seating arrangement creates connection; here we are facing each other, elbow to elbow, in a circle or square or rectangle, passing plates, dishing out the short ribs for everyone because they are too hot to pass. 

We are entering the Table Season. It feels like nonstop gatherings from here until New Year’s resolutions. This happens to coincide with a world that is fractured and volatile. Holidays in their best years are already fragile. This year feels particularly brittle, like it all might shatter with the slightest touch. 

If my own extended family is any indicator, we have voters on the absolute fringes of both parties, a couple casting protest third-party votes, and at least one refusing to participate in the election at all. We have Christians, Agnostics, and something between the two. Some go to a Presbyterian church, some to Catholic Mass, one goes to a Cowboy Church, and several go nowhere. We are country, city, ranch, and downtown lights. We are Black, Native, and white; gay and straight. We are married 50+ years, married with no kids, never married, divorced with five kids, second marriage with four kids under six. 

We couldn’t hit a standardized family template with both hands. 

Surprisingly, miraculously even, we are super-close. 

I blame the table. 

We have used it judiciously for decades. Barbeques, hibachi on the Blackstone, Sunday dinners, turkeys on a spit, burgers on the grill, taco bars, homemade individual pizzas, hot dogs on the roller. My brother-in-law, probably furthest from me politically, invites me to spend the night all the time and creates a fancy steak dinner over candlelight with just me, my sister, and him for “cozy conversation.” 

The polarized zeitgeist suggests we cannot break bread across such chasms, but the table says we can. It has a clear function in this wild experiment called connection, and that is offering a seat. The table says pull up a chair, look folks in the eye, hear your name spoken by someone who knows you or wants to. It holds food made by loving hands, because turns out nurture is bipartisan. Like my beloved departed friend Rachel Held Evans wrote: “This is what God’s kingdom is like: a bunch of outcasts and oddballs gathered at a table, not because they are rich or worthy or good, but because they are hungry, and they said yes.” 

Here is what the table isn’t designed for: to change someone’s mind, or make them see your point, or prove why they are so misguided, or poke holes in their theories. It doesn’t exist for you to deliver a perfectly cogent speech supporting your position. It isn’t a place to finally be right, or finally win the argument. You aren’t on camera and no one is clocking your talking points. Laying down your sword for two hours doesn’t make you a bad citizen; it makes you a family member. The table isn’t a center ring, nor is it a debate stage weirdly set with glassware. It is neutral, because everyone is there to eat. 

Center rings and debate stages have their place, to be sure, but not every environment is intended for a showdown. The President does not deliver the State of the Union at a birthday party. In this weary moment, the table’s chief purpose is belonging, if only for this one meal. There are some places where the highest water mark is just to be human together. That is all the table asks and offers. We are not required to place untenable pressure on a dinner. We don’t need to contort it into spaces better suited for complex debates. Perhaps, at this moment, we just need to pass the mashed potatoes.

There are some beautiful ways to make the table connective, even across every manner of division. This is in no way prescriptive, but here are a couple of thoughts for letting the table be the table at its best this season:

1. Be gently proactive in advance: “Family, we don’t have all the same views, but we love each other. Please let today just be about enjoying time together. Let’s leave divisive comments and conversations behind today, please. Everyone belongs here!” You could send this as a simple text.

2. Set the tone. I once went to a dinner party where the hostess had very simple name cards at our seats. On each one, she wrote her favorite thing about that person. It was so generous, I am still thinking about it. Believe it or not, if you are walking into a volatile room, everyone is anxious about it, not just you. Right out of the gate, start with hugs, eye contact, kindness, genuine curiosity. Keep your body language open. Uncross your arms. Lower your shoulders. Be a good listener. Be a kitchen helper. Refill drinks. Hold someone’s baby. Clear the table. Laugh at your uncle’s story you have heard forty times. Today is not for battle. 

3. Consider broaching a roundtable conversation over dinner with a singular question everyone has to answer. If this feels cringey or out there for your family, I promise it is beautiful in practice. This is a way to center the people, not the issues. A few possibilities:

    • What is the best thing that happened to you this year?
    • What are you looking forward to the most for next year? 
    • What is a fun fact most people don’t know about you?
    • What is the best gift you ever received?
    • What is the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you?
    • What is your absolute favorite holiday tradition? 
    • If you had to spend $500 on yourself, what would you buy?

You will end up laughing, agreeing, and connecting over stories you’ve never heard. It keeps everyone focused on each other and out of the weeds. 

Priya Parker said, “The way we gather matters, because how we gather is how we live.”

The table gives us a chance to gather well, to live well, a real-time opportunity to embody the goodness we wish for. It isn’t meant to solve decades of family problems or bring us into political alignment. It isn’t a bandaid for past harm or a free pass on dysfunctional patterns. It doesn’t make anyone less difficult or more likable. It isn’t a magic table. 

But surprisingly, it can become a place where we hold each other’s stories with tender hands. Where we can find compassion for someone hurting. Where we prioritize belonging, if only for an evening. The issues will all still be there tomorrow – they are howling at the door already – but the table can tuck us safely inside for a few hours of “cozy conversation” and offer a short respite for the hyper-vigilance most of us endure. 

Decide it can be lovely, and it just might become that. 

Not If I Can Help It

Posted on by Amanda Duckett

A few thoughts on the assassination attempt:

Political violence is a super highway to fracture, civil unrest, and the erosion of democracy. It is to be roundly condemned in any form. Wherever it is the majority of Americans want to get, violence is never going to be the way. The attempt on Trump’s life is a tragedy and symptom of our particular American thirst for violence.

Now is not the moment to give in to our lowest, basest impulses. This isn’t the time for outrageous conspiracy theories, unfounded blame, and incendiary rhetoric. It took the internet five minutes to go fully insane. An innocent person died and it is shocking more didn’t. Our responses are telling.

God, which way are we going to go? Which direction are we going to steer? America is in a vice grip, and we have a choice. Our collective response is powerful.

Rachel Kleinfeld, an expert on political violence and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said this in POLITICO:

“You stop political violence through accountability, widespread condemnation from your own side and public revulsion. It’s all of us regular people saying we don’t want this in our society, and we’re going to change how we speak about the other side to make it less common.”

Garen J. Wintemute, the director of the Violence Prevention Program at the University of California, Davis, said to the The New York Times:

“It’s the job of that majority to make their views known, over and over again, and as publicly as possible. A climate of intolerance for violence reduces the chance that violence will occur. The question before us as a nation is, ‘Will violence become part of American politics?’ Each of us as an individual needs to answer that question, ‘Not if I can help it.’”

Remember that the wildest fringes do not represent almost all of the rest of us. Most conservatives and progressives are not blood thirsty and are actually sick to damn death of the inflamed, dehumanizing fringes sucking all the oxygen from the room. This is the moment for cooler heads to prevail.

We cannot control what a presidential candidate says, what TikTok says, what extremist elected officials say. We can only control what we contribute to the zeitgeist. We either reward extremist, violent behavior with our agreement (or silence), or we roundly condemn it and disincentivize the dark direction our country is taking.

“Not if I can help it” is our particular power, and we should use it.

Making the Shift

Posted on by Amanda Duckett

Fifteen days ago, I posted this pic:

Four days ago I received an email from Oprah’s team inviting me to join a conversation next week. This is an excerpt:

“When you were little, your body spoke to you.
And you listened.
You danced.
You jumped.
You ran.
You played.
Your body said you were strong.
And you believed it.
But, somewhere along the way, that connection was lost – drowned out by what others told you was real.
Your size became something people criticized.
Your shape was scrutinized.
You felt the shame.
And chased what you believed to be a perfect version of yourself.
We have been taught that our weight somehow represents our worth.
But that ends today.
You are here because you are ready to make a shift in how you think about, talk about and live within your body.” – OPRAH 

I am beyond ready to think about, talk about, and live within my body differently. Aren’t we all? Aren’t we exhausted from all this? None of it HAS EVER WORKED. 

I’m weary of the shame, the diets, the meanness, the way we trigger one another and splash our internal shame on other women. I’ve offended and been offended. There just has to be a better way.

I’m joining Oprah on May 9 in NYC with other women to find our way out. I don’t want to live the rest of my life at war with my own beautiful body.

Nothing matters to me more than the safety and health of this community. Not even for Mother Oprah would I subject us to harmful diet culture jazzed up for a new decade. I wouldn’t subject MYSELF. 

Sisters, not only do I hear your concerns about the Oprah special being sponsored by  Weight Watchers, loud and clear, but I and my team asked ALL the same questions before committing to this event. 

Here are some of the links I referenced while considering the invitation: 

New conversations start somewhere, imperfectly, and I believe this is one of those moments. The whole event will be streamed and free. I’d love for you to join the conversation. Let’s do this together.

 

REGISTER HERE