A Slice of Simplicity: The Lighter Side of Gathering
A slice of purpose
Your reason for gathering need not be serious. Sometimes, it's just pie.
This past winter, a woman I know (named Shazia) was invited to a small dinner. The day before, she picked up an apple blueberry crumb pie at her local farmers’ market and texted a photo to her host: “Hope everyone likes pie!”
She got a text message back, full of question marks. She’d gotten the date wrong. By a month.
Shazia wanted to spend the day with others, and clearly was going to need some help eating this pie. She turned to Instagram: “I can’t eat this pie by myself, so if you’re in New York and you have something to celebrate, I will be making pie deliveries today!” (Her IG account is private.)
“I’ll take one!” a friend wrote. “Twist my arm,” a neighbor joked. “Wait is this real?! I want pie! lol” another replied. Her need was specific and practical (get this pie off my hands). And then, by asking for help, it became an adventure.
She packed the pie into containers, laced her sneakers, donned her warmest coat, and set out. She found herself eating pie in the living room of a woman she’d clicked with at a bar; delivering a slice to a beloved former roommate on her stoop; meeting a cousin at a restaurant and ending up at a bar in the wee hours of the morning with her cousin's friends.
Along the way, folks began sharing stories of times they, too, got dates wildly wrong: arriving a day early to a wedding and stepping in as a rehearsal flower girl, showing up for a surprise party the wrong night (oops), arriving a week early — wine in hand — to a dinner party, prompting confused (and generous) hosts to stage an impromptu pizza party. Shazia returned home at midnight, full of pie and connection.
We gather to do the things together that we can’t (or don't want to) do alone.
I talk about purpose a lot. Purpose is the heart of artful gathering. But the purpose of a gathering need not be Serious. Sometimes it’s literally just pie. The purpose of a gathering is its animating force. It’s the why. And the simplest way to start determining a purpose is to figure out an actual need.
Last month, I wrote that the first step of becoming an artful gatherer is observation.
The second step of becoming a more artful gatherer is learning to identify a relevant need. What can you not do alone? What is an actual need that only a group of people can address?
Shazia’s need was authentic, clear, and observable. Her guests' role and function were also incredibly clear. And her people rose to the occasion. (“Let me get that pie off your hands!”) The pie became the vessel for connection.
You can do this too. Here’s one thing to practice this month.
Whenever I’m asked to help plan an event — be it a friend’s baby shower or a leadership retreat — I don’t start with an assumed image in my head of what it’s going to look like. I start instead with deep curiosity about the needs of the people in that community in that moment in time. I ask these simple questions:
What is the actual need here?
What could only happen through and with this specific group of people that you couldn’t do on your own?
Why, at the deepest level, are you hosting this thing?
Which guests (or hosts) is this event really for?
Why are you doing this?
What is the purpose of the event?
In the weeks ahead, think about a gathering in your life that might need a re-think. What is the actual need in the community right now? What might the purpose be? And why is it that we actually need to be together in this moment?
When a gathering sprouts from an actual need, we give our guests the pleasure of relevance, of use, of being, well, needed.
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