Untethering

Untethering can be just as important as tethering itself. It reminds me of the anti-networking party I attended with Carly Valancy right before the holidays. I schlepped all the way to Williamsburg from the northern sea town of Manhattan and even ran into Taylor Harrington 🎉 and David Nebinski, all echoes from separate work with Seth Godin.

I left with good conversations, good omens, and swag I actually love. Most of all, I felt full without being depleted.

Carly has this beautiful mantra, paired with a matching CRM, to facilitate the good kind of tethering. The kind that fuels you for the long haul. It helped me remember something dear I’d misplaced after the harsh winds of a pandemic and living abroad for so many years. And because I love a good definition, what are we talking about when we whisper t e t h e r?

The Cambridge Dictionary reminds us that to tether is to connect or relate to someone or something. It also means to tie a rope to another, especially an animal. As someone who fears being chained to anything, to tether feels almost incriminating, as if I am convicting myself before I leap into connection, bracing for a rope.

But connecting to fruitful people, places, land, and ideas is precisely what’s needed today. And so we land at untethering, the precursor to a life well connected. Unwinding from what and who no longer works. Pulling yourself out of stories that are too tight and feel itchy to the touch.

Carly is brilliant in the way she relates the cultivation of connections to tending a garden of flowers. More and more, I realize the necessity of gardens. Wildflowers in the form of humans, seen and unseen. The magic that takes place when we tether to what is good and true for us. We become stewards of gardens, fueled by conversations that later swell into communities of varying size and impact. We awaken to the insight that when we dig deep enough in ourselves, we find everyone else.

It isn’t a choice whether we connect or not. To tether or not to tether is not the question.

Rather, it is: to what do we tie our anchor? Where do we plant our roots and honor our famed notoriety with the earth itself, not because we’re fancy, but because she herself is majestic and our association with her is equally praiseworthy.

If belonging is at the heart of humanity, then what actually stops us? Conscious tethering equates to life, beauty, and the moments we regard as fulfilling in our private, innermost dwellings.

Carly reminded me of belonging. Meeting echoes of the past by way of the future reminded me of why that is so magical. And this post is a future shoutout to connect in meaningful ways with ourselves and those we love, even if we don’t know them yet. The fibers that bond us grow invisibly beneath the surface, like cells of imagination stretching across the Milky Way, more and more with each smile. May we, then, dare to smile more.

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Illustration by Ritam Baishya on Unsplash