Nobody who signs the Human Flourishing Pledge knows how to do everything it asks. Neither do I. I think that may be the point.

When Dave and I got engaged, we made promises about a marriage we had never lived. We had no evidence that we knew how to keep them because, of course, we didn’t. We made the decision before we had the competence. There really isn’t another order available.

A promise is a strange thing that way. You give your word about how you intend to act in situations you have not encountered yet, under pressures you cannot anticipate, as a person you have not fully become. The promise does not prove you can do it. The promise tells you what you mean to practice becoming capable of.

That is what I think the Pledge is. It asks people to pursue truth over tribe. To seek first to understand before seeking to persuade. To work to broaden minds rather than simply win arguments. To engage the questions that matter honestly and across difference.

Those sentences are easy to agree with when nobody is irritating you. They become considerably more interesting when the person across from you is wrong about something important. Or when you are.

A signature is not the accomplishment. If it stops at the signature, it means very little. The value is in deciding beforehand how you intend to show up when the real moment comes. The Practice of Dialogue grew out of the gap between those two things: the Pledge gives us the promise; the Practice is the discipline of learning how to keep it.

That is why nobody needs to become good at this before signing. In fact, I’m not sure what that would even mean. After fourteen weeks of writing about the Practice, I am more aware of the places I fail at it than I was when I started.

I still defend things before I examine them. I still notice emotion in someone else before I notice it in myself. I still decide I understand what someone means before they have finished telling me. I still occasionally want patience to mean waiting graciously for another person to come around.

The decision comes first. Then comes the practice.

There is a much larger version of that pattern in our history. In July 1848, one hundred people put their names on the Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls, sixty-eight women and thirty-two men, supporting claims about women’s equality that the country was nowhere close to honoring. One of the signers was Charlotte Woodward, eighteen or nineteen years old, who earned her living sewing gloves at home. She would live long enough to see the Nineteenth Amendment ratified seventy-two years later.

Woodward never actually got to cast the vote she had put her name behind as a teenager. Illness kept her from voting in 1920, and her eyesight later failed. She signed anyway.

A century later, another decision began much smaller. After Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery in December 1955, organizers called on Black residents not to ride the city buses on Monday, December 5. About ninety percent stayed off the buses. That afternoon, community leaders organized to continue what had begun as a one-day boycott. It would last thirteen months, ending after the legal defeat of bus segregation.

The people who refused the bus that first morning did not begin with a thirteen-month plan. They agreed to Monday. They made the decision available to them that day.

I am not comparing the Human Flourishing Pledge to either of those struggles. The stakes are not comparable, and Human Flourishing has no claim on their moral weight. What interests me is something much simpler: people had to decide what they stood for before they could know what living that decision would require.

That pattern repeats everywhere important commitments are made. We promise before we know the cost. We begin before we know the route. We declare something worth trying to become before we have become it.

Then reality gets a vote.

“The pledge resonated with the ideals I look to see in a flourishing world – not a world where we all agree, but one in which we respect different views, welcome disagreement as opportunities and act to build connections across the ‘divide’ rather then widen it. And, in signing the pledge, I felt myself committing to doing just that by being part of the conversations (taking action, not just thinking about it).” — Ariel E.

“I’ve never signed my name on anything faster than I did for the Human Flourishing Pledge. Why? Because I know there are more people hungry for the politics of potential than the politics of polarization.” — Christine O.

Those early signatures matter to me precisely because there wasn’t much to sign up for yet. No gathering had happened. There was no crowd. Most of what Human Flourishing might become still existed in drafts, conversations, diagrams, and an increasingly alarming number of documents on my computer.

What existed was the Pledge. People read it and decided: Yes. This is how I want to try to show up.

Last week, some of those people sat down across from one another. They brought different professions, histories, convictions, experiences, and ways of seeing the world. Some had known each other for years. Some had never met.

We were still going around the room when someone admitted they had caught themselves rehearsing what they would say when their turn came. Another person was speaking, and they had already moved ahead to their own contribution. They invited the rest of us to notice whether we were doing it too.

I recognized the habit immediately. I can be very busy preparing to be understood while the person I mean to understand is still speaking. After all the writing and planning that had brought us into that room, I had arrived with plenty left to practice myself.

The conversations continued throughout the day. That evening, more people joined us for the Forum, in person and online, and we launched Human Flourishing publicly. We celebrated together. After months of work, I could look around and see people choosing to help give this a life beyond anything we could have created ourselves.

When we eventually went home, we took new relationships, questions, and possibilities with us. We had begun something together, and the Pledge would keep asking something of us in the conversations that followed.

It matters in the kitchen, in the meeting when someone says the thing that makes your chest tighten, in the group text, in the conversation with your adult child, in the car on the way home from the family dinner that went sideways again. It matters when truth and tribe pull in different directions, when seeking first to understand requires listening to something you very much do not want to hear, and when the other person holds a piece you are missing and you would strongly prefer that they didn’t.

A room can give us somewhere to practice. A Field Guide can give us language. Fourteen essays can make an argument. Eventually, though, there is just a person and a decision.

Fourteen weeks ago, I began writing about a discipline for conversations across difference. Since then we have talked about truth, certainty, enemies, defending, understanding, honesty, clearer seeing, identity, emotion, repair, and patience.

The Practice is the how. This is the decision underneath it.

I will try to put truth ahead of belonging to the right side. I will try to understand before I persuade. I will try to remain curious when contempt would be easier. I will keep returning when I fail. Not because I already know how, but because I have decided that this is the kind of person I want to become more capable of being.

That is what Dave and I did a long time ago, before either of us had any idea what keeping a marriage promise would actually require. The Pledge asks strangers to do something similar in public.

Nobody signs it knowing how.

That is the only time anybody ever makes a promise like this one.

Read the Pledge.

Don’t sign it because you already live every line of it. Sign it if those lines name the person you intend to keep practicing becoming.

Part 14 of 14

References

U.S. National Park Service, Women’s Rights National Historical Park, “Signers of the Declaration of Sentiments” and “Charlotte Woodward.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, “Montgomery Bus Boycott.”