Who Shows Up

Advent, attention, and the courage to arrive honestly

“We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything but beginners, all our life.”
-Thomas Merton

This summer, I got to know New York from the back of a taxi.

Since COVID, the city has sprouted these little street-side dining huts. They slow traffic to a crawl, but they make the city feel like one long dinner party. As we inch forward, scenes flicker past the window. Couples leaning in close. Friends passing plates. Young adults negotiating over the last mozzarella stick like it matters more than it probably does. Meanwhile, finance guys, the “fin bros,” sit with the focused intensity of a CrossFit class. I imagine them trading investment strategies and confidence in equal measure. I don’t know much about money, but they seem very sure that they do.

In the amber glow of the streetlights, everyone looks animated. Engaged. Almost glamorous.

But do these distant first impressions ever tell us the whole story?
If I had to guess, they don’t. Almost never.

The fin bro is probably more scared than he lets on. About money. About life. About whether he’s enough. The college kid guarding the mozzarella stick might be carrying anxiety so heavy it’s hard to breathe some mornings. And those couples leaning in close? Most of them fight more than they frolic. You just don’t see the arguments from the sidewalk. Or on Instagram.

Showing up, it seems, is one of the bravest things we’re asked to do.

Most of us are afraid. Afraid to be who we really are. We wrestle with our shadow selves, the parts we’d rather not acknowledge, and we get good at the stories we tell to cover them up. As the line between truth and illusion blurs a little more each day, it’s getting harder to know what’s real.

And there’s a cost to all this performance.

We can be surrounded by people, even talking to them, and still feel completely alone. I’ve been in rooms with friends and family who don’t really understand or respect what I do, and with colleagues who only seem to know me by what they need from me. In those spaces, I’ve learned how to go quiet and become useful, dispensing whatever’s required like a vending machine, even when what I want is connection. That’s a kind of loneliness that isn’t cured by company. It’s not just that we’re isolated. It’s that we’re not known. And until we are, no amount of dinner parties, group chats, or shared mozzarella sticks will fill that hollow space.

Which makes this time of year feel especially tender.

December has a way of putting us back in rooms we didn’t choose. Family gatherings. Office parties. Dinners with people we promised we’d call but didn’t. Conversations we’ve been rehearsing since last year. Old dynamics, old jokes, old silences waiting right where we left them.

We arrive carrying quiet questions.
Who will I be tonight.
Who do they need me to be.
Which version of myself is safest to bring through the door.

Sometimes we show up hoping to be seen. Sometimes just hoping not to be noticed too much. Sometimes bracing for the version of ourselves that only appears around certain people. The one we thought we’d outgrown. The one that still flinches. The one that learned how to survive a room by staying small or staying impressive.

Underneath it all is the same ache. To be known without being managed. To be welcomed without having to perform. To sit at a table and not have to explain ourselves into belonging.

This is where Advent keeps surprising me.

Not as a season of answers, but of arrivals. People traveling. People showing up tired. People unsure of how they’ll be received. A holy night marked not by speeches or explanations, but by attention. A child born into borrowed space. Visitors bringing what they have, not what impresses.

Silent Night has always felt strange to me. Not because the world was quiet, but because something true happened without anyone trying to control it. No announcements. No strategies. Just presence. Just listening. Just the kind of silence that makes room instead of filling it.

There are characters who show up in the story, even the ones we added later. A drummer boy with no gift except a rhythm he already knows. Shepherds with more questions than answers. Everyone offering what they have and discovering that it’s enough.

We don’t become ourselves in isolation. We discover who we are when someone sees us and stays. When we are listened to without being fixed. When we’re allowed to show up unfinished.

That feels like the invitation of this season. Not to curate connection, but to risk presence. Not to say the right thing, but to listen long enough for something honest to surface. Not to arrive dazzling or defended, but real.

I don’t know who will show up at all the tables I’ll sit at this year. I don’t always know who will show up in me. But I’m wondering if the work isn’t to arrive with answers, but with attention. To notice who’s there. To let the night be quieter than we expect.

Maybe that’s how connection begins. Not with saying more, but with making room. Not with being impressive, but with being present. Not with fixing the loneliness, but with letting ourselves be known.

One table.
One conversation.
One silent night at a time.

Merry Christmas.

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