Many of us find ourselves in a space nobody prepared us to be.
It's not the building part. We've been to school. We know the technicalities. We've got that figured out. The part nobody talks about is the moment you look up in the middle of what you've built and realize you've forgotten who you are.
How do you build without losing sight of yourself — without disconnecting from the cultural and spiritual roots that nourished you into becoming who you are?
So many of us who are building in this moment are in uncharted waters. In many cases, we're more successful than our parents. We're in rooms they couldn't have dreamed of entering. We're achieving more than they imagined for us. And still, a lot of us are feeling a certain hollowness. A disconnectedness.
In 1900, James Weldon Johnson wrote what would become known as "Lift Every Voice and Sing." The man's pen game is unbelievable. The poetry and power of that song are breathtaking. I think it ALL the time. This section of the last verse in particular has been echoing in my head recently:
"Lest our feet
Stray from the places our God
Where we met thee
Lest our hearts
Drunk with the wine of the world
We forget thee
Shadowed beneath thy hand
May we forever stand
True to our God
True to our native land."
Looking around right now, I see a lot of us wrestling with exactly that. We are the most successful, most wealthy, most educated generation. And yet, in many ways, we're unmoored. I fear too many of us have become lost in the pursuit of ambition, success, and achievement — and forgotten what has fueled our people's thriving in a hostile land.
And then there are the children. Too many of our kids have been raised insulated from the very history that would equip them for the world they're actually living in. They've inherited our success without the wisdom that made survival possible. And now the world is shifting beneath their feet. The rights and protections that many of them took for granted are actively being rolled back. The society that smiled at them — that told them they belonged — is showing a different face. Do they know how to navigate that? Do they have the spiritual foundation, the communal anchors, the historical memory to stand when the world becomes hostile to them simply because of the skin they're in? I fear we loved them into comfort and forgot to love them into resilience.
My prayer in these difficult days is that we reclaim. I pray that we haven't drifted so far — so deep into a hyper-capitalized, individualistic, sensationalized Western world — that we can't go back and fetch what we left behind.
Family, it's time to reclaim. Reclaiming starts with remembering: who loved you first, what sustained you before the success, and whose shoulders you're actually standing on.
J. W. Johnson encourages us again:
Let us march on, til victory is won!