Keith is a dad. A designer. A husband. A systems thinker. An entrepreneur. A founder of SYPartners. A founder of kyu (a creative collective). A stroke survivor. A photographer. A passionate participant in making a more equitable, inclusive, creative world.

How we spend our days is how we spend a life.

Like so many of us, I’m in the principled struggle to align my intention with my attention—in the taunting of Mary Oliver, what is each of us to do with our one and precious life?

I’ve written a lot about set back. All of which seems so wickedly small compared to what we have collectively been through together, over these past 14 months. The decimation that has been this pandemic. This racial reckoning—of four years, or four decades, or four centuries. This fundamental reordering of the global economy. This new redefinition of what is essential, and who is essential, to our society.

I have ventured to say, we are all on our own trauma-renewal curve.

The Journalist Farai Chideya equates this to a train crashing, late in the night. We are all on the train. Which cars are crushed and who suffers most depends on the relative position of your train car to the cars of others. Depending on American caste, one’s race, one’s resources—you are closer to the heat of the crash, and what the train collided with. But make no mistake, all of us on the train are affected.

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So what does it mean to lead, knowing virtually every human we cross paths with is going through something?

Since the earliest days of the pandemic I’ve been working with Dr. Jack Saul, a expert in collective trauma; Gayle Young Whyte, a coach and business psychologist; and Esther Perel, one of the world’s experts on relationships to understand what we each must know about how to be in this era.

I’ve worked to develop this model to help us each place where we are in our own trauma-renewal cycle, and as important, how we can relate to others who are on other parts of the curve.

I’ve observed the nature of our lives: We work through our sufferings and sorrows, making unconscious and conscious choices that either help nurture our own renewal or further spiral us downward.

Like grief—and models on grief—this model can be linear, each of us moving through it stage by stage. But for many, it’s nonlinear—we find ourselves on it, seemingly making progress, and then the next week we are sent backward.

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