What Holds?

After twenty moves across thirty years of military life, I've accumulated what I can only call an involuntary data set — a long, unplanned study in what human connection actually requires when you remove the convenience of proximity.

What I kept noticing was that the difference rarely came down to circumstance. The communities that held, the relationships that lasted, the people who showed up when showing up was costly — they weren't operating from better conditions. They were operating from a different assumption about who matters and what connection is worth.

This series is my honest attempt to understand that assumption. It moves through military installations and faith congregations, a kitchen in New Delhi and a hurricane evacuation in Florida, twenty years of arrivals and departures and the question I keep asking underneath all of them: what holds?

I don't have clean answers. What I have is the evidence — and the belief that the question is worth taking seriously.

Series Index

1. What Holds(Introduction): Two stories of connection that failed — in completely different ways — and the honest reckoning with what that reveals about assumption, fear, and the question I've been asking for thirty years.

2. What Held Me(On portable identity): The year the floor gave out. Empty nest, COVID, Bogota, a language barrier, and the bewildering discovery that what I'd been gripping wasn't load-bearing at all — and what was actually underneath when the gripping stopped.

3. We're Only Here for a Little While, So Let's Be Friends Fast(On military community): My daughter said it at nine years old and went on to live it through four high schools in four years. What military community gets right about belonging — and the shadow side of being known.

4. Worth the Effort(On faith community): Someone told me, out loud, that we'd be leaving soon — so. The ellipsis that said everything. And then there were the Flores’, and the Bonds, two families in San Antonio who decided otherwise.

5. You Are Rich(On gratitude and perspective): I argued with her for thirty minutes. I had evidence. She listened to all of it. And then, calmly, matter-of-factly — the way you'd state the weather — Manjula told me I was rich. Nearly twenty years later, I'm still unpacking it.

6. What Fear Does to a Room(On fear, generosity, and operating systems): Hurricane Frances did a 270-degree turn and came back. What I watched in that evacuation — from inside my own considerable fear — was a study in what pressure reveals about what people actually believe.

7. What We Owe Each Other (Conclusion): All seven threads converge. The civilizational argument. The question left open. What do you actually believe you owe the people you find yourself alongside?