Lately, a single question keeps returning to me, quietly but insistently: What is this moment asking of us, of me?
There is no denying the ugliness that presses in on the world right now. When it presses in from every direction, the instinct is understandable: narrow the lens, turn inward, tend to one’s own life and the small circle of people we love, and leave the rest of the world to sort itself out. Retreat can feel like self-preservation.
But retreat is an illusion. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are bound to one another. Each of us contributes—through presence, action, and choice—to the moral weather of the world. When the balance tips toward care and steadiness, you feel it without explanation. And when it tips toward cruelty or indifference, even moments of joy arrive tinged with unease, as though something fundamental has been disturbed.
None of us can single-handedly right a train that feels as though it has come off the rails. But neither are we condemned to sit motionless in despair. The familiar refuge of you do you, I’ll do me begins to ring hollow when the collective fabric is fraying. I don’t know that we have the luxury to opt out.
We have all seen how one person can change a room. The single colleague whose bitterness infects an entire team. Or the way a single voice—bright, unguarded—offering a good morning in a crowded elevator can subtly lift the day. The power of one has never been theoretical. It has always been immediate.
In times like these, we underestimate how much influence we carry within the ordinary contours of our lives. Not the influence of protest or proclamation, but the quieter, more exacting work of showing up as the leaders we long for.
This is what it means to hold the line.
The line of decency.
Of integrity.
Of fairness.
It means choosing kindness when despair would be easier. Meeting our reflexive distrust with the discipline of seeing another human being, someone likely carrying the same modest hopes for peace, safety, and dignity. It means relinquishing the belief that we are entitled to every convenience, regardless of the friction or harm it causes others.
I had been carrying these thoughts and working to shape them into a blog for some time, but they crystallized in a small, telling moment: a shopper abandoning his cart in the middle of a parking lot, rendering a two-way passage unusable. I could understand not wanting to walk the cart back. What stayed with me was the ease with which everyone else’s inconvenience was simply dismissed.
This is where the unraveling happens, not in catastrophe, but in accumulation. In these moments, small, unremarkable, easily excused, we are entirely in control. We decide how we will inhabit the world.
I have always been struck by how often leadership is confused with hierarchy. One is assigned by title; the other is a responsibility we all carry. We lead with our families, our colleagues, our friends, and strangers we will never meet again. We lead through tone, choice, restraint, and care. Leadership, in its truest form, is not positional, it is behavioral. Leadership is practiced, not bestowed.
There are few moments I can recall that have asked this of us so clearly. What is at stake is not only our individual well-being, but the kind of world we are rehearsing into being. Every action participates. Every omission does, too.
We may tell ourselves we are sheltered from chaos. We are not. Energy, whether generous or corrosive, moves like water. It finds its way into everything. And so holding the line is not about moral superiority or being our brother’s keeper. It is about protecting the conditions that make life, our own lives, and the lives of those we love—livable.
This moment is calling each of us to lead.
Quietly. Consistently. Without applause.
And in doing so, we hold the line, not for perfection, but for what we refuse to let slip away.
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